HANGZHOU - Alibaba Group announced on Monday that it will invest more than 380 billion yuan (about $53 billion) in building cloud and AI hardware infrastructure in the next three years, capitalizing on the rapid growth of the AI industry.

The investment figure exceeds Alibaba's total cloud and AI spending over the past decade. Moreover, it is the largest investment ever made by a private Chinese company in cloud and AI hardware infrastructure construction.

The announcement comes amid the country's burgeoning AI industry growth and following a symposium on private enterprises attended by top Chinese leaders on Feb 17.

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The explosive AI growth has far exceeded expectations while the booming domestic science and technology industry has shown huge potential, said Eddie Wu, Alibaba Group's CEO. "Alibaba will spare no effort to accelerate the construction of cloud and AI hardware infrastructure to promote the development of the whole industry."

The huge investment is expected to boost the confidence of relevant industries and underscores Alibaba's unwavering commitment to investing in the future, Alibaba said.

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Alibaba Group on Thursday confirmed its fastest quarterly revenue growth in more than a year, backed by its growing cloud computing business and AI investments.

Alibaba's revenue for the quarter ending Dec 31, 2024, grew by 8 percent to 280.15 billion yuan compared to the same period of the previous year, outperforming market expectations.

Notably, revenue from its cloud computing business logged the highest growth in more than two years, up 13 percent year-on-year to 31.74 billion yuan.

The growth of Alibaba Cloud has been primarily boosted by double-digit growth in public cloud revenue, with AI-related products achieving triple-digit year-on-year growth for the sixth consecutive quarter, according to Alibaba Cloud.

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Alibaba Cloud, the top cloud computing company in Asia, has released four generations of its Qwen foundation model, a top-performance open-source foundation model.

"We will continue to focus on three business categories -- domestic and international e-commerce, AI+cloud computing, and internet platform businesses. We are confident that our focused strategy will drive sustained solid growth for Alibaba Group," noted Wu during an earnings call with investors and analysts. He added that the AI era has a clear and huge need for related infrastructure.