Alibaba Group Holding CEO Eddie Wu Yongming met Chongqing party secretary and Politburo member Yuan Jiajun on Tuesday to discuss potential collaborations in artificial intelligence (AI), as the Chinese technology giant's AI capabilities gain increasing recognition.

In a meeting in Chongqing, Yuan said the southwestern metropolis and Alibaba "have new major opportunities for cooperation", according to local official media. He expressed hopes that the two parties could work together to achieve "landmark results" in areas such as AI model applications and building computing facilities.

This followed Alibaba's announcement of an ambitious plan to invest US$52 billion in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years, in China's largest-ever computing project financed by a single private business.

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The pledged amount exceeds the company's total spending on AI infrastructure over the past decade and equates to around half of the initial US$100 billion investment earmarked for the United States' Stargate Project aimed at boosting AI infrastructure.

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Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming speaks a the 2024 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China. Photo: EPA-EFE alt=Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming speaks a the 2024 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China. Photo: EPA-EFE>

Chongqing had huge potential for AI development and the city was "seizing the opportunity" to empower itself using AI, Yuan was quoted as saying.

Yuan, a former rocket scientist who ascended to the Politburo and became Chongqing party secretary in 2022, also said he was grateful to Alibaba for its strong support in building a "digital Chongqing" and developing AI in the sprawling city of over 30 million people. Yuan was party secretary of Zhejiang province, home to Alibaba's headquarters, from 2020 to 2022.

In a show of commitment to Chongqing, Wu said Alibaba's direction was "highly consistent" with the municipal strategy and promised that the company would continue to deepen its presence in the city across various fields, including AI infrastructure construction, cloud computing, AI-powered consumption and government services, according to local media reports.

Alibaba is among the world's top players in AI models. Its self-developed Qwen large language model series, which underpin generative AI services akin to OpenAI's ChatGPT, consists of some of the most widely adopted open-source models.

The company is set to unveil a new reasoning model, QwQ-Max, which could compete with OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1.

Local governments across China have rushed to apply AI models to daily operations after start-up DeepSeek shocked the world with its R1 model, which rivals the performance of industry-leading peers despite being trained at a lower cost.

Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan in Guangdong province are among the first cities to adopt DeepSeek models in online government services.

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