Alibaba Group Holding’s heavy investments in artificial intelligence have moved beyond the “initial” phase and entered “full-scale commercialisation”, the Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant says in a shareholder letter as it doubles down on AI as its next major growth engine.

“We expect the addressable market for companies like Alibaba that provide full-stack AI capabilities is poised to grow exponentially,” chairman Joe Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu Yongming said in a joint shareholder letter issued on Wednesday.

“Today, we stand at a critical inflection point in the development of artificial general intelligence.”

The letter underscored Alibaba’s efforts to position itself as China’s leading full-stack AI provider. Its ecosystem spans the entire AI life cycle, from its proprietary T-Head chips and cloud infrastructure to model-as-a-service platforms and Qwen foundation models. Consumer-facing products include the Qwen app and the Wukong enterprise agentic AI platform.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

“What we’re building is China’s AI factory,” said Liu Weiguang, senior vice-president of the cloud computing unit, at Alibaba’s cloud summit in Hangzhou on Wednesday.