Catenaa, Thursday, August 20, 2026- Alibaba on Thursday reported a 75% drop in profit for the latest quarter as it invested heavily in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The Hong Kong- and US-listed company, which started in e-commerce and online retail but is increasingly focused on AI technologies, said that its profit for April-June was 10.5 billion yuan ($1.6billion), down from43.1 billion yuan($6.4 billion), the same quarter last year.
Quarterly revenue grew 9% to almost 269 billion yuan (nearly $ 40 billion), with revenue from its AI cloud and compute services up 45% to 48.4 billion yuan ($ 7.2 billion), even as revenue from its AI-related services gained 45%.
But capital expenditures, including investments in AI infrastructure to meet customer demand, jumped 75% to 67.7 billion yuan (about $10 billion) during the quarter, weighing on profits.
Alibaba attributed the significant increase in spending to factors including “fluctuations” in procurement cycles, an increase in CPU central processing unit) compute capacity in anticipation of growing customer adoption of AI “agents,” and higher pricing of chip components.
“As we continue to ramp up our supply, our AI and Cloud revenue growth will accelerate further in the coming quarters, alongside continued improvement in profitability,” said Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu in prepared remarks during an earnings conference.
Alibaba’s US-traded shares fell more than 3% Thursday.
Alibaba, one of China’s biggest companies, said last year it planned to invest at least 380 billion yuan (about $56 billion) over three years in cloud computing and AI infrastructure.
It has been making advances with its flagship Qwen AI and has launched “agentic” AI services for commercial customers. In July, it previewed its Qwen3.8-Max AI model, which the company said was “second only” to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.
It has also pledged an ambitious goal of surpassing $100 billion in terms of annual AI and cloud revenue within the next five years.
