AI’s $80B Day: Alibaba Goes All-In, Nvidia Ships Groq, Xpeng Robotics Scores $900M

Alibaba is putting $10.3 billion (HK$80 billion) into AI — and I mean all of it. The company announced its first secondary share placement since its 2019 Hong Kong listing, with 100% of the net proceeds going to full-stack AI capabilities and infrastructure buildout. Founders Joe Tsai and Eddie Wu followed up by buying HK$120 million worth of shares themselves. Also today: Alibaba launched Wan3.0, its video generation model, and published new research on an AI model that detects tiny liver tumors — again landing in a top-tier journal. Three major AI moves in one day. They're not playing around.

Nvidia's Groq 3 LPX is now in full production. The $20 billion Groq acquisition from last December just paid off — the inference accelerator architecture is commercially live. This is all about low-latency inference, the kind that makes AI agents feel responsive instead of painfully slow. Coding assistants are a prime use case. Nvidia reports earnings Wednesday — everyone's watching.

**Xpeng Robotics just raised over $900 million** in its first external funding round, hitting a post-money valuation north of $6.3 billion. That's a record for a single private equity round in China's embodied AI space. The company's IRON humanoid robot is slated for a 2027 market launch. Meanwhile, NIO's autonomous driving head Ren Shaoqing is spinning out his own embodied AI company, with NIO taking a strategic stake. China's EV players are piling into physical AI.

Meta's HATCH is coming in weeks. The consumer-facing OpenClaw AI assistant (codenamed Hatch) is set to launch soon, with a new model called "Watermelon" following in October. Zuckerberg needs to monetize that massive AI spend — advertising alone won't cut it forever.

A few more to track: Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity at a $30B+ valuation; AI cloud provider Lambda is negotiating a $3B round at a $12B valuation; Hugging Face is exploring a sale at a $13B valuation; Microsoft's Nadella warned companies against lock-in to a single AI model — "you're outsourcing your thinking," he said; and Alabama is investigating OpenAI over the Hugging Face security incident.