Alibaba and NetEase bet future on AI despite looming US restrictions, as home province Zhejiang vows to support Big Tech
- Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang Yong and NetEase CEO William Ding Lei have expressed confidence that the government will support their AI pursuits
- Zhejiang has become China’s first province to launch a local policy guideline designed specifically to help Big Tech firms

“Top internet players are all speeding up and developing their [LLMs],” he said. “The new resonance between new technologies and the platform economy model has opened up space and prospects for new development.”
William Ding Lei, founder and CEO of NetEase, said his company will budget at least 10 billion yuan (US$1.38 billion) a year to address “choke points” in AI, including algorithms and chips for large models. NetEase will try to build a state-of-the-art AI system that is “100 per cent self-developed” and on a par with, or even better than, international competitors, he said.
The comments were made during a conference on Wednesday hosted by the provincial government to encourage development of internet platforms such as NetEase and Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.
China has started to prop up the platform economy after a nearly two-year crackdown kneecapped the country’s most powerful tech players. Chinese tech champions, once neck-and-neck with their US peers in market value, are now dwarfed by Western rivals.