Alibaba Group Holding chairman Joe Tsai has expressed optimism about US-China trade tensions.
“I’m actually quite optimistic that we’re not going to devolve into kind of a race to the bottom”, he said during an interview with CNBC dated October 10 and published on Monday. “The two countries’ leaders have the wisdom to come to a point where they recognise that this is a hugely symbiotic relationship,” he added.
Tsai, who owns the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, spoke on the sidelines of an NBA pre-season game.
On the subject of the race for dominance in artificial intelligence, Tsai said that “having large adoption is the most important thing”.
China had two unique advantages, he said. One was the “proliferation of consumer applications” and the other was “a big manufacturing base” that provided “all the great industrial data” to “develop good AI”, he said.
Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, has bet big on AI, advancing the Qwen model family and investing heavily in its AI-based cloud businesses. In February, the company pledged to invest 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) over the next three years in AI infrastructure, which CEO Eddie Wu Yongming vowed last month to expand.