Alibaba Group Holding has kicked off its spring hiring season with 3,000 internship openings for fresh graduates, half of them related to artificial intelligence (AI), as the Chinese e-commerce giant commits to advancing the technology.

The recruitment campaign targets students graduating between November 2025 and October 2026, with internships spanning multiple business units. Nearly half of the roles - including more than 80 per cent of positions in the cloud computing arm - are AI-focused.

The scramble for talent by Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, comes as Chinese start-up DeepSeek has set off a national frenzy to adopt AI in various industries and sectors, worsening a shortage of workers with knowledge in the technology.

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While Alibaba cut its headcount by 24,940 to 194,320 last year owing to its divestment of offline retail operations, demand for tech talent remains strong.

"As a technology company committed to exploration and innovation, Alibaba is ramping up efforts to attract and cultivate AI talent," Jane Jiang Fang, chief people officer, said in a hiring post on Thursday. "We aim to provide outstanding young professionals with broad career opportunities as we embrace the vast potential of the AI era."

Alibaba has doubled down on AI with large investments earmarked for related infrastructure. Photo: AFP alt=Alibaba has doubled down on AI with large investments earmarked for related infrastructure. Photo: AFP>

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 local e-commerce unit Taobao and Tmall Group, the overseas-facing Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, logistics service provider Cainiao and other divisions.

Alibaba also highlighted its global AI recruitment initiative. The AI Clouder Programme, co-organised by Alibaba Cloud and Tongyi Lab, aims to "identify and nurture top-tier AI talent for the new era".

Hangzhou-based Alibaba has been doubling down on AI investment. It announced on Monday a plan to put at least 380 billion yuan (US$52.2 billion) into AI and cloud computing infrastructure over the next three years.

The amount surpasses the company's total AI infrastructure spending over the past decade and marks China's largest-ever computing project financed by a single private business.

Alibaba this week also launched QwQ-Max-Preview, a deep-thinking reasoning model based on the preceding Qwen2.5-Max, and open-sourced its Wan2.1 series of video-generation models.

The company was among the first major global tech companies to open-source its large-scale AI models. In September, it introduced the Qwen2.5 series, releasing over 100 open-source models with parameters ranging from 500 million to 72 billion.

Its open-source models have contributed to the creation of more than 100,000 models on the online developer community Hugging Face, according to Alibaba.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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