SHANGHAI — Chinese tech giant Alibaba is already recouping its investment on artificial intelligence in the company’s e-commerce business, vice president Kaifu Zhang told reporters on Thursday.

The Chinese tech giant has bet big that AI will generate returns despite market concerns that companies are spending too much on the technology with little to show for it. Alibaba last month announced it will increase its spending on AI and cloud infrastructure, after pledging in February it would spend 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over the next three years on the tech.

Zhang oversees e-commerce AI applications at Alibaba. Earlier in the day, he shared how the company has rolled out a range of AI tools, from making search results more personalized to improving the accuracy of virtual clothing try-ons.

The presentation comes a day after Alibaba began presales for Singles Day, China’s biggest shopping event of the year that’s akin to Black Friday.

Zhang said preliminary testing has showed consistent results from AI, including a 12% increase in returns on advertising spend.

“It’s very rare to see double-digit changes” in such tests, he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. Zhang predicted that thanks to AI integration, there would be a “very significant” positive impact on Alibaba’s gross merchandise volume during this year’s Singles Day shopping period, which centers on Nov. 11.

Alibaba’s China e-commerce unit remains the tech giant’s largest source of revenue, with growth of 10% year-on-year in the quarter ended June 30 to the equivalent of $19.53 billion.

Despite lackluster Chinese consumer spending in the last few years, during the Singles Day period last year, research firm Syntun estimated 20.1% year-on-year growth in sales to 1.11 trillion yuan for Alibaba’s Tmall, JD.com and PDD.

The company on a late August earnings call cast AI and consumption as “two major historic opportunities” that require Alibaba to make investments of “historic scale.”

“Our first priority at this point is making these investments,” CFO Toby Xu said at the time. “So for now, we may place relatively less emphasis on profit margins. But that does not mean that we don’t care about margins.”

Upgrade, the online lender started by LendingClub founder Renaud Laplanche, has raised a new round of funding that values the startup at $7.3 billion.

The company said in a press release on Thursday that it raised $165 million in a round led by Neuberger Berman, with participation from LuminArx Capital Management. Laplanche, who created Upgrade in 2016, said it’s the first time the company has raised money since 2021.

“We’ve been cash flow positive over the past three years, so we didn’t have to do a new round,” Laplanche said in an interview.

Upgrade got its start offering relatively small personal loans, operating in a similar market as LendingClub. The company has since expanded deeper into financial services with checking and savings accounts, a credit card, credit health monitoring and a buy now, pay later offering. In 2023, Upgrade acquired BNPL travel company Uplift for $100 million.

Revenue has more than doubled since the company’s last fundraise, Laplanche said, and annualized revenue passed $1 billion in May.

Laplanche, who took LendingClub public in 2014, said Upgrade is looking to IPO but wanted additional capital for its balance sheet in the meantime. He said the company is also establishing a new valuation as it begins to offer employee liquidity.

“We were probably 12 to 18 months away from an IPO at this stage,” he said. “So we wanted to go ahead and make sure everyone could sell a little bit of stock now without having to wait for the IPO.”

Although consumer lending is still dominated by traditional banks like JPMorgan Chase, Laplanche said the majority of Upgrade’s customers are migrating from the legacy banks to take advantage of more automated and faster services.

“This year, we’re focusing mostly on making the customer experience make sense across multiple products and making sure that the customer who might have joined Upgrade through a BNPL product has a very seamless experience,” Laplanche said.

The company has also been focusing on home improvement and auto financing, areas that surpassed $2 billion and $1 billion, respectively, in total loan originations earlier this year.

Competition is rising across the board.

Chime, which offers an array of online banking services, went public in June. SoFi has been gaining popularity. And fintech companies including PayPal and Square parent Block have been adding more banking services to their portfolios.

Within BNPL, there’s Affirm and Klarna, which held its IPO last month.

Laplanche said Upgrade’s focus in BNPL has been in the travel industry, through relationships with airlines, cruise lines, car rental companies and hotels.

“It’s a pretty specific industry that’s different from retail, where Klarna and Affirm are stronger,” he said.

WATCH: Trust is the key to unlocking real-time payments

Paxos, the blockchain partner of PayPal, mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of the online payment giant’s stablecoin on Wednesday in what the company called a “technical error.” 

Market watchers had spotted the enormous injection of the PayPal PYUSD stablecoin on Etherscan — a block explorer and analytics platform for the Ethereum blockchain.

Paxos had mistakenly minted the stablecoins as part of an internal transfer, before it “immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD,” the company said in a social media statement. 

“This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root cause,” it added. PayPal didn’t respond to an inquiry from CNBC outside of regular business hours.

Transactions on Etherscan showed that the mistake had been fixed after about 20 minutes. 

PYUSD is advertised as a dollar-pegged stablecoin that is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. treasuries and similar cash equivalents. Therefore, PayPal says the tokens are always redeemable for U.S. dollars on a 1:1 basis. 

However, the technical error highlights that the dollar peg is guaranteed by PayPal and its independent third-party attestation reports, rather than intrinsically tied to the minting of a stablecoin. 

There aren’t enough dollars in global circulation to back $300 trillion PYUSD, which would theoretically require more than double the world’s estimated total GDP. 

Paxos’ error comes at a time when stablecoins are becoming more mainstream as its adopted by an increasing number of banks and payment platforms. 

PYUSD is currently the sixth-largest stablecoin in the world with a market capitalization of over $2.6 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.