Nvidia continues its streak of high-profile deals: just days after confirming a $5 billion stake in Intel and a massive $100 billion investment in OpenAI, the GPU leader has now partnered with Alibaba.
On Wednesday, Alibaba announced that it will integrate Nvidia’s AI development tools for robotics, autonomous vehicles, and connected environments into its Cloud Platform for AI. Through this collaboration, Alibaba will provide access to Nvidia’s Physical AI software stack, which enables the creation of 3D digital replicas of real-world spaces. These replicas can generate synthetic data to train AI models for robotics, autonomous driving technology, and bright spaces, such as warehouses and factories.
Although financial details of the agreement were not disclosed, the partnership is significant, combining Nvidia’s expertise in AI-optimised chips with Alibaba’s role as a central cloud and AI model developer.
Alibaba highlighted that it is increasing AI-related investment beyond its earlier $50 billion budget as it builds out its AI division alongside its core e-commerce business. The company also announced plans to open its first data centres in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, while expanding its existing infrastructure across 91 data centres in 29 regions globally.
In addition, Alibaba unveiled the newest version of its Qwen large language model family, called Qwen 3-Max. According to the company, this is its largest and most advanced model so far, trained on 1 trillion parameters and designed for coding and agentic AI applications.
