Alibaba released its Wan3.0 AI video model on Monday, one day after unveiling a $10 billion share sale dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence. The new tool converts documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, and web pages into 30-second video clips, the company announced in a post on WeChat.

From public beta to full rollout in three weeks

Alibaba Cloud said Wan3.0 entered public beta on August 6. In the weeks since, users have applied the model to short dramas, film production, advertising, tourism campaigns, and music videos.

The workflow is deliberately simple: a user feeds the model existing material — a slide deck or a spreadsheet, for example — and receives a short video in return. Alibaba is positioning the product for businesses that already produce documents and want them repackaged, rather than for hobbyists creating clips from scratch. That business-facing approach places Wan3.0 in a crowded area of the AI market, where companies are racing to turn generative models into tools that fit into existing production workflows.

Wan3.0 arrives amid intensifying competition. ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, shipped its Seedance 2.0 model in February; that system generates video from text, images, or existing footage. Disney subsequently issued a cease-and-desist order over characters that appeared in user-made clips, as Cryptopolitan reported at the time.

$10 billion raise as quarterly profit drops 76%

The day before Wan3.0 shipped, Alibaba said it would place HK$80 billion — about $10.2 billion — in new shares and commit all of the proceeds to AI. The raise would "extend the company's global AI leadership," Alibaba said, adding in its August 23 announcement that it is investing in its full-stack AI push, including expansion of infrastructure.

Demand from sovereign wealth funds and long-only funds outstripped the size of the offering, a person familiar with the deal said, prompting Alibaba to increase the placement to HK$80 billion. The transaction is the largest primary follow-on offering ever made by a Hong Kong-listed company.

The fundraising follows a quarter of heavy spending. Profit for the three months to June 30 fell 76% to 10.54 billion yuan, roughly $1.55 billion. On August 20 the company reported that revenue rose 9% to 268.95 billion yuan, about $39.64 billion.

Capital expenditure climbed 75% to 67.68 billion yuan, approximately $9.98 billion, with most of the increase tied to AI infrastructure. Cloud revenue grew 45%.

CEO Eddie Wu Yongming told investors that the company expects its AI computing investments to break even within three years. On last week's earnings call, he said improving margins could shorten the payback period to around two years. Alibaba is targeting $100 billion in combined annual cloud and AI revenue within five years.