Nvidia is on a dealmaking spree: Days after committing to taking a $5 billion stake in Intel and a whopping $100 billion investment in OpenAI, the GPU maker has now struck a partnership with China’s Alibaba.
Alibaba said on Wednesday that it is integrating Nvidia’s AI development tools for robotics, self-driving cars, and connected spaces into its Cloud Platform for AI. The Chinese e-commerce giant will offer Nvidia’s Physical AI software stack, which can construct 3D replicas of real-world environments to generate synthetic data with which AI models can be trained for robotics, self-driving vehicles, or smart spaces like factories and warehouses.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this marks a significant collaboration, as it brings together the world’s foremost developer of chips optimized for training AI models, and a major cloud services and AI model developer.
The deal comes as Alibaba focuses on building out its AI business further alongside its main e-commerce business. The company said on Wednesday that it is ramping up spending on AI tech past its previous $50 billion budget, and outlined plans to launch its first data centers in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands. It is also building more data centers in more countries, expanding its data center presence at 91 locations in 29 regions around the world.
Alibaba on Wednesday also unveiled the latest iteration of its Qwen family of large language models, Qwen 3-Max. The company claims the model is its “largest and most capable model to date,” trained on 1 trillion parameters, and that it is well-suited for coding and agentic use.
