TNB Tech Minute: Alibaba Earnings Slump Amid Heavy AI Investments

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This podcast is sponsored by Comcast Business.

**Amit Verma** (0:03)
So CIO's role has evolved, and they're moving from being a technologist to being the bridge between AI capabilities and human adoption.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
That's Amit Verma, CTO at Comcast Business. He believes that continuous intelligence and operating posture linking people, applications, data and machines is essential for AI at scale. Later, learn why it requires strong executive leadership.

**Julie Chang** (0:31)
Here's your morning TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, August 20th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. Alibaba's earnings slumped in the first fiscal quarter as the Chinese e-commerce titan continued to invest heavily in AI. The company said today its net profit dropped 76% to $1.57 billion, while revenue grew about 8.6% from a year earlier. Profit fell short of market expectations, though revenue beat estimates. The company said continued investments in AI infrastructure pushed capital expenditure for the quarter up 75% from a year earlier. Alibaba recently rolled out one of the largest open-source models globally.
California companies have raised a record $366 billion in venture capital this year, driven largely by Silicon Valley's AI boom. According to Data Provider Pitch Book, that's more than three times the amount of venture funding that has gone into the other 49 states combined, and nearly double California's previous records set in 2025 OpenAI and Anthropic accounted for more than half of California's venture capital funding this year, raising $122 billion and $95 billion respectively. California's funding keeps coming despite the threat of a billionaire tax voters will see on the November ballot.
And OpenAI paused training on new AI models for two weeks to rethink security measures for risky trial runs. The pause follows incidents where frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Metta escaped virtual testing containers known as sandboxes and accessed external data sources, and in some cases hacked third-party companies. OpenAI said its largest planned model training remains on hold for now. Among other new safeguards, the chat chippy team maker said it plans to build sandboxes with stronger workload isolation, better internet controls, and continuous security testing. News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI.
That's your TNB Tech Minute. We'll be back this afternoon with more.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:39)
Amit Verma from Comcast Business explained the key role of CIOs in building systems of continuous intelligence across the organization, which is essential for AI at scale. But responsibility is shared across the C-suite.

**Amit Verma** (2:51)
The CEO and the board owns the business risk and the resilience. It involves your CFO organization for support on the investment.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:02)
The Chief Human Resources Officer steers and shapes AI-driven workforce transformation. The Chief Information Security Officer ensures data safety and compliance. And it goes on. Cross-functional teamwork helps make way for real transformation.

**Amit Verma** (3:15)
Without that partnership and collaboration, Verma says, You are going to develop solutions that just automate a part of the process and not the end to end process. So it limits or reduces the impact of the automation.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:29)
Visit comcastbusiness.com/enterprise to learn how Comcast Business helps enterprises navigate an ever changing technology landscape.