{"id":655148,"date":"2026-08-25T06:27:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T06:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/655148\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T06:27:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T06:27:35","slug":"alibaba-dilutes-shares-to-feed-its-ai-spending-spree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/655148\/","title":{"rendered":"Alibaba Dilutes Shares To Feed Its AI Spending Spree"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>    <a href=\"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/lo\/mysterio\/api\/55E4506433B86BBA7E75742349C2C661DC8BE20C40871F46505D6D85E6CD71F9\/subgraphmysterio\/resizefit_w960;quality_80;format_webp\/https:%2F%2Fmedia.zenfs.com%2Fen%2Fmoby_896%2F7fb71b5c6b7fb53e9ae9977adffb9502.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP\/\/\/ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==\" alt=\"Alibaba Dilutes Shares To Feed Its AI Spending Spree\" height=\"1152\" width=\"928\" class=\"yf-1f8hkhu loader\"\/><\/a> Alibaba Dilutes Shares To Feed Its AI Spending Spree &#8211; Moby           THE GIST          <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\"><strong>Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we&#8217;ll show you why it&#8217;s our #1 pick. <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/moby.co\/get-started?utm_source=yahoo_finance&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=bounty&amp;utm_content=top_article_nvidia\" data-ylk=\"slk:Tap%20here.;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas;source:content-canvas%20default\" data-yga=\"{&quot;yLinkText&quot;:&quot;Tap here.&quot;,&quot;yLinkElement&quot;:&quot;context_link&quot;,&quot;yModuleName&quot;:&quot;content-canvas&quot;,&quot;yTrafficOrigin&quot;:&quot;content-canvas default&quot;}\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\"><strong>Tap here.<\/strong><\/a>  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">You know the old saying, &#8220;you&#8217;ve gotta spend money to make money?&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Historically, that plays out in one of two ways: you spend money and make more, or you go broke. Alibaba, like U.S. hyperscalers Meta and Amazon, is figuring it out the hard way.  <\/p>\n<p>            WHAT HAPPENED          <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Alibaba, China&#8217;s Amazon, AWS, and PayPal all rolled into one, decided the best way to raise money for AI infrastructure is to dilute its shares: The company announced a $10.2 billion capital raise Monday morning.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Alibaba will sell 710 million shares at HK$112.70 (about $15). The stock immediately fell 10% on the news. Settlement and delivery should be completed in the next couple of days.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">This comes after another correction last Wednesday, when the company reported a 75% drop in profit for the June quarter due to heavy AI spending.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Early last year, Alibaba pledged RMB 380 billion (~$53 billion to $56 billion) over the next three years dedicated to AI and cloud infrastructure. To close out 2025, it spent about ~$18 billion. In 2026, projections range from ~$25 billion to $28 billion, leaving ~$10 billion to $12 billion for 2027 and 2028.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Something tells us that it&#8217;s going to be more, hence the placement of newly issued shares to non-U.S. investors. The question is: will it be enough to get them to the finish line of 2028, or are they going to have to do this again?  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Given Alibaba&#8217;s AI models&#8217; scores across several leaderboards, we&#8217;re assuming the latter. It&#8217;s a hint that this may not actually be about intelligence, but a cloud computing takeover.  <\/p>\n<p>        WHY IT MATTERS          <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\"><strong>One stock. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first. Get the pick. <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/moby.co\/get-started?utm_source=yahoo_finance&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=bounty&amp;utm_content=middle_article_30m\" data-ylk=\"slk:Tap%20here.;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas;source:content-canvas%20default\" data-yga=\"{&quot;yLinkText&quot;:&quot;Tap here.&quot;,&quot;yLinkElement&quot;:&quot;context_link&quot;,&quot;yModuleName&quot;:&quot;content-canvas&quot;,&quot;yTrafficOrigin&quot;:&quot;content-canvas default&quot;}\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\"><strong>Tap here.<\/strong><\/a>  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Alibaba&#8217;s AI model Qwen is good, but not great.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Alibaba&#8217;s Qwen 3.8 Max and its open-weight version (Qwen 3.8 2.4T A95B) both landed at 58 on Artificial Analysis&#8217;s Intelligence Index, a benchmark that ranks 600+ models on overall capability. That puts them a few points behind Claude&#8217;s Opus 5 and Fable 5 (63 and 62), but ahead of GPT 5.6 Sol and Meta&#8217;s Muse Spark 1.2. Not bad for Alibaba, especially since one of those Qwen models is fully open-weight and downloadable.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Cost is where Qwen takes a hit, taking 10th and 11th place out of 616 models on Artificial Analysis&#8217;s &#8220;Cost per Intelligence Index Task.&#8221; OpenAI and Anthropic&#8217;s models lead in this category. Qwen&#8217;s high cost per task perhaps points to why Alibaba&#8217;s profit dropped 75% in June and why they&#8217;ve tapped capital markets for the third time. It&#8217;s all about compute.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">As we&#8217;re seeing with OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and other leading AI companies and hyperscalers, the cash burn that comes with running their models when following a loss leader strategy isn&#8217;t only in the U.S. Alibaba&#8217;s cash flow for the full fiscal year last year fell 53%. The company flipped cash flow negative in 2026, just like Google and others, reporting a negative outflow of RMB 44.67 billion (~$6.58 billion).  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Why, like others, are they doing this?  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">We think it&#8217;s because they trust that when the switch finally flips for AI to thrive in the broader economy, Alibaba will have a massive lead with both its models and in cloud computing. Alibaba Cloud holds a ~38%\u201340% market share in China. ByteDance (Volcano Engine) is at ~14%\u201315%, while Huawei Cloud sits at ~13%\u201315%.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">If they spend now, they can pull so far ahead of the competition, like Amazon, that they&#8217;ll have set themselves up with a digital moat around China&#8217;s AI infra and essentially become too big to fail.  <\/p>\n<p>          WHAT&#8217;S NEXT         <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">Alibaba is on track to comprise about 50% of China&#8217;s growing cloud sector. Projections show it could hit $160 billion by 2031.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"text text-block paragraph text-left neo-font-paragraph-xl-reg  yf-18d6y07\" style=\"text-decoration: none; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; text-align: inherit; font-variant-numeric: normal;\">And AI capex isn&#8217;t stopping, with projections of up to $1.6 trillion, surpassing oil and gas. Alibaba knows it has to spend money to make money. Well, it&#8217;s planning to spend a lot more.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alibaba Dilutes Shares To Feed Its AI Spending Spree &#8211; Moby THE GIST Our analysts just identified a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,8472,1463,289,290,18,19,17,82],"class_list":["post-655148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alibaba","tag-amazon","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117154732008713693","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}