Alibaba Group Holding (BABA, Financials) plans to restart hiring after 12 consecutive quarters of workforce reductions, the company's Chairman Joe Tsai said, marking a shift in strategy that follows recent signals of policy support from Beijing.

Tsai ascribed the revived hiring forecast to a recent conference involving Chinese technology titans, including Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, and President Xi Jinping. Tsai reportedly called the meeting a "very clear signal" that Beijing was pushing companies to grow their personnel and investment. Contending with rising young unemployment and declining consumption, the government has been trying to restore economic development.The Hangzhou-based e-commerce and cloud services company also revealed intentions to improve its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure by 380 billion yuan ($52 billion) over the next three years. Tsai said Alibaba is more concerned with matching investment with real demand than with speculative hopes.Citing over $500 billion in total expenditure on data centers and associated infrastructure, Tsai expressed worry about what he called a possible artificial intelligence investment bubble in the United States. He said that part of this expenditure seemed speculative given the speed of rollout surpassing present need.The chairman's comments come against a backdrop of indications of stability in China's technology industry. The success of local AI firm DeepSeek, which has stressed open-source technologies, has raised the industry mood and is likely to encourage additional employment, especially among fresh graduates looking for positions in information technology.