Today, $Alibaba(BABA.US) Chairman Joseph Tsai's remarks at the HSBC summit were taken out of context. Let's take a look at the surrounding context:
a. I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble......I start to get worried when people are building data centers on speculation. There are several people coming up, funds coming out, to raise billions or millions of dollars without uptake agreements.
b. I am still astounded by the type of numbers that's being thrown around in the US about investing into AI.
c. People are talking, literally talking about US$ 500bn, several hundred billion dollars. I don't think that's entirely necessary. I think in a way, people are investing ahead of the demand that they are seeing today, but are projecting much bigger demand.
It seems that Joseph Tsai's words contradict the future investment amount of 380 billion announced during Alibaba's financial report. From the context, he is mainly talking about the signs of a bubble in AI investment in the US.
This is not significantly related to the domestic situation. The entire AI investment in China has only just started after the emergence of DeepSeek, and during the data center construction process, there is more of a supply shortage under the ban, essentially lacking any process.
Alibaba's aggressiveness seems more like excitement in the face of AI opportunities after several years of dormancy, but the investment amount is for three years, with significant room for adjustment in between. Such announcements are more about boosting morale.
Tencent is even more conservative, with an overall investment logic leaning towards internal digestion under a self-built logic, needing to see an explosion of applications first. (In the next few days, Dolphin Research will provide a detailed commentary on the differences in investment logic between Tencent and Alibaba in AI computing power, so stay tuned.)
Due to the entire computing power industry chain, many Chinese assets are a part of the supply chain for AI in the US, and this statement may lead to collateral consequences.
