Chinese tech giant Alibaba has accelerated its push into artificial intelligence, raising about $10.2 billion through newly issued shares to fund AI spending.

The company confirmed the move in a statement issued on Sunday, saying it aimed to extend its “global AI leadership.”

“Alibaba intends to use 100% of the net proceeds from the equity placement to invest in its full-stack AI capabilities, including to expand and enhance its AI infrastructure,” the company said.

Alibaba will raise the money through 710 million new shares priced at $14.38 each, which represents an 8.4% discount to the closing price of $15.70 two days earlier. The new shares are equivalent to about 3.7% of Alibaba’s previously issued capital.

Market watchers said the transaction was the largest-ever secondary offering on the Hong Kong exchange, while Bloomberg reported that it was the exchange’s largest share sale of any kind since 2021, when tech investment company Prosus sold $14.7 billion of stock in Tencent, another Chinese tech giant. Demand for Alibaba stock was reported to be more than three times the offering size.

The sale was limited to non-U.S. investors, which came amid Alibaba’s continuing regulatory problems in the United States. In June, the company was named on a Department of Defense blacklist that alleged links with the Chinese military, and it is now suing the U.S. government over its inclusion. Chinese AI developers more broadly are also operating under U.S. export controls that restrict access to Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips, prompting several domestic firms to seek alternative suppliers such as Huawei.

The capital is expected to support Alibaba’s broader AI ambitions. In February last year, the company said it planned to invest $53 billion through 2027 in AI infrastructure and cloud computing, a commitment that places it alongside U.S. giants Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta, which are collectively pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data centers, and Chinese rivals including Baidu, ByteDance and DeepSeek, all racing to expand their own models and compute capacity. Alibaba Cloud, the unit at the center of the buildout, has seen growth reaccelerate in recent quarters as demand for AI-related computing has risen.

Just last week, Alibaba reported a 75% year-over-year drop in quarterly net income to US$1.5 billion, along with higher capital expenditure tied to the rising cost of AI infrastructure.

The results came as the company’s latest Qwen 3.8 Max AI model received praise for its capabilities and affordability. However, that affordability may also limit Alibaba’s ability to raise prices enough to offset rising development costs, a dynamic sharpened by DeepSeek’s low-cost models, which have intensified price competition across China’s AI industry.

When trading opened in Hong Kong on Monday morning, the initial reaction to the share sale was negative, with Alibaba’s shares falling by as much as 10%.

Bloomberg later reported that as prices dropped, Alibaba’s top two executives bought about $15.3 million worth of stock between them. Alibaba Group chairman Joseph Tsai bought $10.3 million, while CEO Eddie Wu bought $5 million.

Alibaba has not disclosed detailed plans for how it will allocate the capital beyond its commitment to build out infrastructure, leaving the pace of that deployment an open question, while its legal challenge to the Pentagon blacklist designation remains unresolved.