Alibaba Group delivered its strongest defence yet of an “all in” artificial intelligence strategy on Thursday, with chairman Joe Tsai arguing that AI could ultimately represent a US$50 trillion market and vowing to invest across the industry’s entire value chain rather than bet on a single winner. Speaking at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris, Tsai said Alibaba was pursuing a “full-stack” strategy spanning chips, cloud infrastructure, foundation models and consumer applications,...

Chinese artificial intelligence developers are accelerating their push into massive foundation models with more than a trillion parameters, just as Washington moves to block foreign access to leading US software through unprecedented export controls. Parameters serve as a primary measure of an AI’s capabilities. Chinese companies have been looking to narrow the gap with leading US rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, which continue to aggressively expand the size of their top models. The depth of...

While the US holds the crown for cutting-edge chips, China’s advantages in energy and industrial applications could ultimately erode America’s artificial intelligence “moat”, according to a leading Chinese scholar. Li Cheng, founding director of the Centre on Contemporary China and the World (CCCW) at the University of Hong Kong, said in a co-authored paper on Wednesday that Beijing could dismantle Washington’s AI dominance within the next 10 to 20 years. “The US AI moat still has a strategic...

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek closed its first-ever external fundraising in an unusual and high-stakes deal that could not only reshape the country’s AI landscape but also offer a rare glimpse into how one of China’s most valuable AI start-ups will navigate its next phase of growth, sources and analysts said. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek now has a post-investment value of about 400 billion yuan (US$59.2 billion) after raising around 50 billion yuan in a Series A round, one source...

Alibaba Cloud announced on Wednesday that it has launched its first data centres in France, as it continues to expand its footprint in Europe amid growing calls on the continent for data sovereignty. The move came as a response to increasing demand from customers in the region, the cloud computing services unit of Alibaba Group Holding said in a statement. “The expansion of our cloud infrastructure into France reinforces our ongoing commitment to empowering European businesses with sovereign,...

Saudi Arabia signed housing and construction agreements worth 1.9 billion riyals (US$507 million) with Chinese partners including China State Construction Engineering during a visit to China by its housing minister, as Riyadh deepens cooperation with Beijing on urban development projects. Speaking at a signing ceremony on Monday evening in Shenzhen, Minister of Municipalities and Housing Majid Al-Hogail said Saudi Arabia was accelerating housing and urban-development projects under its Vision...

A new front has opened in China’s electric-vehicle tech war as carmakers design their own smart-driving chips, turning custom silicon into the industry’s weapon of choice in the world’s largest auto market. The latest salvo came on Monday after Li Auto unveiled the Mach M100, a 5-nanometre artificial-intelligence chip tailored for autonomous driving. Designed for the carmaker’s new L9 Livis SUV model, the chip displayed single-unit computing power of 1,280 trillion operations per second (TOPS) –...