During the 2026 Spring Festival, the "red envelope war" in the AI industry was first ignited by Alibaba. To break through in the intense AI entry competition, Alibaba officially launched the "Spring Festival 3 Billion Free Shopping" campaign, deeply integrating AI technology into daily life scenarios, aiming to target the market strengths of Tencent and ByteDance.

This move is a low-level strike through "ecological collaboration."

During the campaign, the AliQian APP gave away more than 1 million orders of bubble tea in a short time. This ability to directly connect with consumer scenarios through AI demonstrates Alibaba's accumulated ecological closed-loop advantage. As a key part of this ecosystem, the 3 million merchant resources and mature delivery system of Eleme not only provided the soil for AI to take root but also became an important support for Alibaba to obtain massive real interaction data.

The 38 billion investment in "infrastructure" has begun to show its strength.

Alibaba's bold move stems from its long-term investment strategy. Previously, Alibaba had invested 38 billion yuan in cloud services and AI hardware infrastructure, aiming to build a comprehensive AI ecosystem. The mid-year report of the 2026 fiscal year showed that although the net profit attributable to shareholders was affected by capital expenditures, the AI product revenue of Alibaba Cloud grew significantly and had become a new growth engine for the group.

The future battlefield: infrastructure determines the ceiling.

From large-scale subsidies to deepening infrastructure, Alibaba's strategic intent is clear: quickly occupy users' minds with large subsidies, and then achieve long-term retention by relying on its own cloud and AI foundation. Industry analysts believe that with the explosion of AI+cloud business, Alibaba may further increase its investment in the AI infrastructure field, striving to secure victory in the next round of entry competition.