Tsai lays out Alibaba’s AI playbook: invest across the stack, figure out the winners later
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, reflecting the company’s belief that it remains too early to determine where AI’s biggest profits will ultimately emerge.
“If you look at global GDP, over US$100 trillion of GDP, at least half of that, US$50 trillion, is about human productivity and human intelligence,” Tsai said. “And that is the TAM (total addressable market) of AI. And that’s why we’re all in on AI.”
The comments offered Alibaba’s clearest explanation yet for its aggressive AI push, as technology companies worldwide pour billions of dollars into data centres, large language models and computing infrastructure while investors debate where long-term value in the industry will be captured.
Tsai suggested today’s market leaders may not necessarily remain the biggest beneficiaries.
“Right now, the model companies, pure model companies, are very hot. They seem to accrue a lot of the value. But over time, that may not be the case,” he said during a panel discussion.