Enterprise AI Budgets to Swell Tenfold, Alibaba Cloud Exec Says

A surge in enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence is expected to arrive in early 2026, with corporate AI budgets projected to swell to 10 times the size of current IT spending in the next few years, according to a senior executive at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group.

“In 2025, I made 186 visits to 146 corporate clients. Most enterprises have started using AI, but it is not yet widely embedded,” said Liu Weiguang, senior vice president at Alibaba Cloud, during a Dec. 31 media interview with Caixin and others. He predicted a new wave of AI application growth in early 2026.