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Alibaba’s $50B+ AI blitz

Partnering with Nvidia to expand global AI footprint

Author

Eddie Yoon
September 24, 2025 • Read time: 8 minutes

👋 Good morning or evening, wherever you are. It’s Wednesday.

Alibaba just announced a $50B+ commitment to AI, its biggest bet yet.

The company is positioning AI as a core business driver with three clear moves:

  • Partnering with Nvidia to secure compute supply at scale

  • Expanding its global data center footprint (Brazil, France, Netherlands)

  • Accelerating new AI models like Qwen3-Max, which reportedly tops GPT-5 on benchmarks

It underlines a fundamental shift in where value will be created.

The market is moving beyond the hype of new model releases toward the harder, capital-intensive business of owning compute capacity, distribution, and the ecosystems that depend on them.

OK let’s keep going ↓

🔥 Creative pulse

This AI film is hypnotically good.

To the Void was a Jury Selection winner at Runway’s recent Gen:48 competition, where filmmakers had just 48 hours to create an AI short.

I’ve already talked about a few entries, but this is another one of my favorites.

It’s from YZA Voku.

There’s a reason YZA feels like an artist’s artist. Anon, humble, and quietly influential.

PS: If you’re passionate about AI creative, join the club. It’s $5/month and the people inside will pull you higher than you could go alone.

Inside you’ll find filmmakers and festival-recognized directors, Cannes Lions jurors, studio veterans, award-winning creatives from film, gaming, music, and ads, plus early builders of the AI tools shaping the industry.

It’s global, it’s full of ambitious creators, and it’s where the next wave of breakthroughs is happening.

One insight or connection inside could change your life. Join now.

💡 Here’s what you should know

💰 The numbers

  • Oracle is planning a $15B bond sale to fund cloud infrastructure and AI investments, one of its largest offerings to date.

  • Variational AI announced a collaboration with Merck worth up to $349M to use its Enki generative AI platform for small-molecule drug discovery.

  • Modular raised $250M to develop software that lets AI applications run across different chips without rewriting code.

  • Rezolve AI secured $200M to expand its enterprise automation and customer engagement platform.

  • Cohere raised $100M at a $7B valuation and partnered with AMD to run its Command-family AI models on Instinct GPUs.

  • Enter (Brazil) raised $35M Series A from Founders Fund and Sequoia to build AI-powered legal automation tools.

  • Emergent AI raised $23M from Lightspeed, Together Fund, and others to develop enterprise AI solutions.

  • Synthesized secured $20M Series A funding to automate software testing with AI.

  • Oolka (Bengaluru) raised $7M seed funding to grow its AI-powered fintech platform.

🧠 Thought starters

The quiet adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) by Google and Apple could be more consequential than any model release.

MCP is not just a connector standard. It is a new abstraction layer, the equivalent of HTTP for the agent era. Whoever controls the most valuable MCP servers (Google with real-world data, Apple with device-level access) will shape where AI agents live and how they act.

Consider the ripple effects:

  • Trust: Hallucinations decline when agents can anchor outputs to MCP-exposed ground truth.

  • Power: Apps and platforms stop being silos and instead become callable functions.

  • Control: Standards are never neutral. If Apple and Google set the rules of MCP, every agent you build will inherit those rules.

The real AI race is not between models. It is between context providers. The new moat is not the biggest LLM, it is the richest MCP ecosystem.

😂 Meme of the day

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

Join the AI Creative Club (you’ll find me there). It’s not only for artists and filmmakers…it’s for anyone who recognizes this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn as much as you can about AI to multiply your impact...to become superhuman. Remember, creativity is just intelligence having fun. This club is for ultra curious people, and if you’ve made it this far…you’re pretty damn curious and probably the smartest one in your circle of friends. It would be my honor to have you in there.

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