Beijing, China - Chinese tech giant Alibaba on Monday announced over $50 billion of spending on artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing over the next three years, picking up competition with the US.

Having announced robust sales growth last week, Hangzhou-based Alibaba is staging a comeback after years of gloom sparked by government crackdowns.

Alibaba plans to "invest at least 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over the next three years to advance its cloud computing and AI infrastructure," a company statement said after its shares soared to a three-year high last week.

The firm said its strategy was aimed at "reinforcing [Alibaba's] commitment to long-term technological innovation... [and] underscores the company's focus on AI-driven growth."

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The statement did not detail how the company would allocate the funds or what specific projects would be supported, but it did add that the investment would exceed its total AI and cloud spending over the past decade.

Based in China, Alibaba's renewed focus on AI could spell trouble for US tech companies which are struggling to compete with the rapid technological development in China.

Last month, Chinese-made Deepseek caused waves to crash into Silicon Valley, as the high-quality AI was developed far faster and far cheaper than anything the US has produced in recent years.

While OpenAI's ChatGPT still dominates the market (despite Elon Musk's attempt to compete with his Grok 3 chatbot), Chinese companies like Alibaba are quickly proving themselves capable of fierce competition.

Alibaba's CEO Eddie Wu said last week that the company's latest quarterly results "demonstrated substantial progress in [Alibaba's] 'user-first, AI-driven' strategies and the re-accelerated growth of our core businesses."

"With this investment, Alibaba is scaling up its AI capabilities and cloud infrastructure to support the next wave of technological advancements, ensuring businesses and developers have the tools to innovate and grow," Alibaba's announcement read.