Alibaba's 7.6 Billion Yuan Bet Yields Over 160 Billion Yuan

Chinese semiconductor giant CXMT (688825-CN) listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market on Monday (27th), marking a historic milestone for China's capital markets and delivering substantial returns to early strategic investors. CXMT opened strongly at 49.50 yuan per share, experienced significant intraday volatility, and ultimately closed at 49 yuan, representing a surge of 465.82% from its issue price.

Notably, the stock recorded a staggering trading volume of 141.187 billion yuan on its first day, becoming the first individual stock in A-share history to surpass the 100-billion-yuan threshold in a single session.

Amid this capital frenzy, Alibaba Group emerged as one of the major winners. According to CXMT's prospectus, Alibaba holds nearly 5% of the company through two subsidiaries, with a total investment of approximately 7.6 billion yuan. Based on the closing market value on the first trading day, Alibaba's stake is now worth over 170 billion yuan, resulting in an unrealized paper profit of more than 160 billion yuan—an investment return exceeding 20 times.

The 21st Century Business Herald reported that Alibaba's investment was not a one-off decision but a phased strategic move. Alibaba initially invested 1.5 billion yuan at the end of 2021 for exploratory positioning. Then, in June 2025, it injected an additional 6.1 billion yuan through Zhejiang Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd., becoming the largest industrial investor in the final pre-IPO round. Although its stake has since been diluted to approximately 4.48%, Alibaba remains the company's largest industrial investor.

As a leading Chinese DRAM developer, CXMT's collaboration with Alibaba can effectively reduce the hardware costs of artificial intelligence (AI) computing power while enhancing supply chain autonomy and stability.

This successful investment reflects Alibaba's strategic transformation in recent years. Since CEO Eddie Wu took office in 2023, Alibaba has established 'AI-driven' as its core goal, decisively divesting non-core assets such as Intime Retail and Sun Art Retail, and concentrating capital on the entire AI value chain.

Statistics show that Alibaba has invested approximately 36 billion yuan in the AI sector over the past three years. Beyond chip-level investments in CXMT, it has also backed leading companies in large language models (LLMs), including Zhipu AI and Moonshot AI (the parent company of Kimi).

The report concludes that this demonstrates Alibaba's long-standing commitment to hard tech is beginning to pay off, as it leverages its investment ecosystem and cloud capabilities to build a closed-loop business model spanning from infrastructure to end-user applications.