United News of Bangladesh

Chinese technology giant Alibaba reported a 75% fall in quarterly profit on Thursday as the company increased spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure, despite strong growth in its AI-related services. Alibaba, which is listed in Hong Kong and the United States, said its profit for the April-June quarter fell to 10.5 billion yuan ($1.6 billion), from 43.1 billion yuan ($6.4 billion) in the same period last year. The company’s quarterly revenue, however, rose 9% to nearly 269 billion yuan ($40 billion). Revenue from its AI cloud and computing services jumped 45% to 48.4 billion yuan ($7.2 billion). The sharp increase in investment weighed on profits. Alibaba’s capital spending, including investment in AI infrastructure to meet rising customer demand, surged 75% to 67.7 billion yuan ($10 billion) during the quarter. Alibaba said the higher spending was driven by several factors, including changes in procurement cycles, increased computing capacity ahead of growing demand for AI "agents" and higher prices for chip components. "As we continue to ramp up our supply, our AI and Cloud revenue growth will accelerate further in the coming quarters, alongside continued improvement in profitability," Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said in prepared remarks during an earnings conference. Alibaba's US-listed shares fell more than 3% on Thursday. The company, one of China's largest technology firms, announced last year that it planned to invest at least 380 billion yuan ($56 billion) over three years in cloud computing and AI infrastructure. Alibaba has made significant progress with its Qwen AI platform and has introduced AI agent services for business customers. In July, the company previewed its Qwen3.8-Max AI model, which it said ranked just behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Alibaba has also set an ambitious target of generating more than $100 billion in annual revenue from AI and cloud services within the next five years.