OREANDA-NEWS  Alibaba's stock prices soared by 7.8% in trading on Wednesday and reached their highest level in four years on the news that the company will increase investments in the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

The Chinese online retail giant has announced its largest artificial intelligence language model, Qwen3-Max, betting on AI as its core business strategy, according to Reuters. This model contains more than 1 trillion parameters - variables that determine how the AI system processes information, Alibaba Cloud chief technology officer Zhou Jingren said at the company's annual conference.

Alibaba chief executive officer Eddie Wu said that the total investment in AI worldwide will increase to about $4 trillion over the next five years, and his company should not lag behind. According to him, Alibaba will soon supplement the plan presented in February, under which it was planned to allocate more than 380 billion yuan ($53.4 billion) to develop AI models and infrastructure over three years.

"The pace of industry development has significantly exceeded our expectations, and the industry's demand for AI infrastructure has also significantly exceeded our expectations," said the head of the company. "We are actively investing in AI infrastructure and plan to increase investments."

Alibaba also unveiled several other AI-powered products on September 24, including Qwen3, an Omni-multimodal immersive system useful for virtual and artificial reality applications such as smart glasses and smart cabins. The head of the company also spoke about the hardware innovations that Alibaba is working on, including chips, faster computers and network technologies.