Alibaba’s top executives buy US$15m in shares in vote of confidence after AI fundraising

The firm is set to issue 710 million shares in one of China’s largest AI fundraising efforts

The price represented an 8.4 per cent discount to the stock’s closing price in Hong Kong on Friday and a 3.6 per cent discount to the Friday closing price of its New York-listed shares, the company said in a stock exchange filing on Monday. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.

The 710 million newly issued shares represented around 3.7 per cent of the company’s 19.17 billion total outstanding shares.

Shares of the Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant fell more than 10 per cent after the market opened.

The Chinese e-commerce and AI giant announced the new share sale on Sunday, pledging to spend the entire HK$80 billion in proceeds to “invest in its full-stack AI capabilities” and “extend the company’s global AI leadership”.

Several banks had received pre-launch expressions of interest – in excess of the deal size – “on the back of strong interest received from sovereign wealth funds and global long-only investors”, a person familiar with the matter said.