Alibaba raised $10.2 billion in a follow-on offering in Hong Kong, the city's largest such offering on record, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is deploying the capital toward AI infrastructure as competition for dominance in artificial intelligence intensifies among technology firms globally.
The offering comes as SoftBank announced plans for a record 1 trillion yen retail bond sale, roughly $6.3 billion, to fund investment commitments to OpenAI. Meanwhile, Nvidia has notified customers of price increases exceeding 15 percent on AI-related products.
Alibaba's Hong Kong listing represents the company's second major capital raise this year. The follow-on offering allows existing shareholders to purchase additional shares, distinct from a primary offering that creates new equity. Hong Kong's largest prior follow-on offering, before this transaction, totaled less than $10 billion. Alibaba's move follows the company's effort to maintain parity with U.S. competitors in spending on data centers, training infrastructure, and large language model development.
The three transactions in August alone, Alibaba's equity raise, SoftBank's bond issuance, and Nvidia's price actions, total roughly $26.5 billion in fresh capital mobilization or pricing power across AI investment. Alibaba accounted for 38 percent of that cumulative amount through equity.
SoftBank's bond offering, scheduled to price on September 4, targets retail investors in Japan and marks the company's largest such offering. The proceeds will backstop its commitments to OpenAI's growth, a relationship that began in 2024 and has since expanded into infrastructure partnerships. SoftBank said it intends to raise the full 1 trillion yen tranche.
Nvidia's price increases, confirmed by customer notifications to multiple technology firms, apply to next-generation GPU products as orders for AI chips remain stacked months in advance. The company has not publicly announced the scale or duration of the pricing actions, but the 15 percent-plus threshold represents the first broad-based increase in flagship product lines since the launch of the H100 generation in 2023.
Alibaba's capital raise closes within days of the company's earnings announcement and amid intensifying competition from ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu for edge in generative AI model development and deployment. The company has committed to spending billions on AI research and infrastructure through 2026. The Hong Kong offering follows regulatory approval in mainland China for Alibaba's AI investments.
The document to watch is Alibaba's next quarterly earnings report, expected in October, which will disclose how quickly the company deploys this capital and what returns it achieves on AI infrastructure spending compared to peers.
