Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares soared on Friday as investors welcomed the company's increased artificial intelligence investments.

The company announced on Thursday that it would raise funds through a $3.2 billion zero-coupon convertible bond issuance, with approximately 80% of the proceeds allocated to cloud computing infrastructure, including data center expansion, technology upgrades, and service enhancements to meet AI-related demand. The remaining funds will be directed toward international e-commerce operations.

Analysts widely believe this financing reflects Alibaba's confidence in its future prospects. Jefferies expects Alibaba Cloud revenue to continue maintaining high growth rates, benefiting from AI demand.

Alibaba previously disclosed that its cloud business revenue grew 26% year-over-year in the April-June quarter, primarily driven by AI. Chief Executive Officer Wu Yongming emphasized that "AI+Cloud" and e-commerce will constitute the company's dual engines for the future. The company also plans to invest at least $53 billion in this sector over the next three years.

On Thursday, Alibaba released its latest large language model, Qwen3-Next, which optimizes long-text comprehension capabilities and significantly reduces training costs.

Additionally, reports indicate that both Alibaba and Baidu have been using self-developed chips to train AI models, a development that has boosted market sentiment.

Nomura analyst Jialong Shi noted that the strong stock performance may be related to chip development, though the market still knows little about the details of its chip business.