Rocketing share price, ambitious investment plans and a liberal peppering of artificial intelligence jargon? It took a while, but China’s Alibaba is taking its place among the high-rolling hyperscalers.
This past month US-listed shares in the group, which started as an online retailer but has branched out into entertainment and cloud computing, are up some 40 per cent. Alibaba has been a better investment this year so far than US tech giants such as Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Palantir.
Its tardiness is partly the result of provenance. Foreign investors shunned Chinese equities for years, deterred in part by a lacklustre economy and interventionist government policies. But companies based in the People’s Republic are now starting to win customers abroad, from electric vehicle maker BYD to AI model upstart DeepSeek. The latter showed China can create credible technologies, even without state-of-the-art US chips.