Alibaba Group Holding Limited (Alibaba (BABA)) is starting to sound less like an e-commerce company and more like an AI infrastructure hyperscaler trying to combine the roles of Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN) and Nvidia (NVDA) under one roof.

During its earnings call, Alibaba executives repeatedly described a business rapidly expanding across AI models, cloud infrastructure, chips, enterprise software and AI agents — all while demand for compute appears to be exploding across China.

Alibaba's Full-Stack AI Push

"Our full stack capabilities span models, cloud infrastructure and applications with established leadership in every layer," Alibaba CFO Toby Xu said.

That transformation is already beginning to show up in the numbers. Alibaba said Cloud Intelligence Group's external revenue growth accelerated to 40%, while AI-related product revenue has now posted triple-digit growth for 11 consecutive quarters.

The company added that AI-related product revenue now accounts for 30% of external cloud revenue and could surpass 50% within about a year.

The strategy increasingly mirrors a blend of Microsoft-style AI applications, Amazon-like cloud infrastructure and Nvidia-esque compute positioning.

Alibaba's Nvidia-Like AI Scarcity Moment

Perhaps the most striking comments came around compute demand.

"There isn't a single card on our servers that is idle," Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said while discussing AI infrastructure demand.

He added that Alibaba's "ability to supply this demand is not able to keep up with all the growth in demand," suggesting China's AI boom may already be running into infrastructure bottlenecks.

Alibaba also revealed that the cost of deploying AI servers has surged.

"The cost for us to deploy one new server this year is double what that same server would have cost a year ago," Wu said.

That combination of soaring demand, infrastructure scarcity and pricing power increasingly resembles the dynamic that helped fuel Nvidia's explosive rise during the AI boom.

Cloud, Chips And AI Agents

Alibaba is also moving deeper into AI hardware and inference infrastructure.

"T Head's proprietary GPU chips have achieved scaled mass production," Wu said, adding that more than 60% of compute capacity from those chips is already serving external customers.

The company described itself as "the only AI Cloud provider in China capable of delivering self developed AI chips at scale."

At the same time, Alibaba is aggressively expanding AI applications and agents. The company said its AI assistant ecosystem now spans Taobao, Alipay, Amap and Fliggy, while AI coding and agentic workloads are becoming major growth drivers.

Alibaba executives said the company is now seeing a major shift from conversational chatbots toward autonomous AI agents — a transition they believe could dramatically increase compute demand.

Looking ahead, Wu said China may ultimately require "10 times the amount of data center infrastructure compared to what we had in 2022."