Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE:BABA) commenced its spring hiring season with 3,000 internship openings spanning multiple business units, half of which were in artificial intelligence.

Nearly half of the roles, including more than 80% of positions in the cloud computing arm, are AI-focused, SCMP reports.

Alibaba was among the first major global tech companies to open-source its large-scale AI models.

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Alibaba’s move coincided with DeepSeek’s AI model price war, offering discounted off-peak pricing for developers. Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and its rivals were already engaged in a price war to win market share. 

The first phase of the intern recruitment will focus on Alibaba Group, Alibaba Cloud and its AI-model research unit Tongyi Lab, food delivery service Ele.me, online mapping service and ride-hailing platform Amap, and video-gaming subsidiary Lingxi.

The next stage will cover the Taobao and Tmall Group e-commerce units, the Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, and logistics service provider Cainiao.

Alibaba announced on Monday that it plans to invest at least $52.2 billion in AI and cloud computing infrastructure over the next three years, topping its total AI infrastructure spending over the past decade.

Benchmark’s Fawne Jiang hailed Alibaba as a leading player in China’s AI sector, backed by a competitive edge in infrastructure, proprietary models, and application capacity across diverse use cases.

Price Action: BABA stock is down 4.61% at $130.42 premarket at the last check Friday.

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