Alibaba Expands AI Intern Workforce While DeepSeek Slashes Model Prices in Market Battle

Alibaba Group Holding 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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