When the NBA tipped off its China Games in 2025, featuring the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns, it wasn’t just another preseason spectacle.
It marked the unveiling of one of the league’s most ambitious technological partnerships a multi-year collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, designed to reinvent how hundreds of millions of Chinese fans engage with basketball. Half a continent away, in India, the league’s focus couldn’t be more different. There, the NBA’s game plan is rooted not in artificial intelligence or premium digital monetization, but in patient, grassroots cultivation a long play to build a basketball culture in a nation still dominated by cricket.
Together, these twin strategies China’s AI-led modernization and India’s scale-first development define how the NBA is reimagining global sports expansion in the digital age.
China: Building a Technological Fortress
In October 2025, the NBA announced Alibaba Cloud as its Official Cloud Computing and AI Partner for China a partnership that goes far beyond conventional sponsorship. This deal signifies a deep, infrastructural integration, with NBA China migrating its core digital assets, including its app, website, and mini-programs, to Alibaba’s domestic cloud network. At its core, this move achieves two strategic goals: compliance and control. By hosting on a domestic hyperscaler, the NBA ensures alignment with China’s stringent data localization laws, while shielding itself from potential cross-border data restrictions or geopolitical shocks that might disrupt foreign-hosted platforms.
It’s a calculated pivot designed to secure long-term operational sovereignty in a $5 billion market. But the real innovation lies in AI-powered fan engagement. Using Alibaba’s Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) large language models, the NBA is developing a proprietary AI system fine-tuned to its own digital ecosystem highlights, player stats, and even historical footage. The result: hyper-personalized basketball experiences for Chinese fans.
The partnership also introduced a technological showpiece Real-Time 360 Replay debuting during the NBA China Games 2025. This feature, powered by AI algorithms tracking every player on the court, delivers multi-angle, spherical replays in real time. For Chinese viewers accustomed to premium digital products, it represents an immersive step beyond traditional broadcasting. The AI strategy doesn’t stop at viewing. At NBA House events, fans can now create personalized avatars or generate custom commentary clips using voice replication transforming spectators into digital participants.
With Alibaba’s consumer platforms, Quark and the Tongyi App, integrated as official marketing partners, the NBA has effectively plugged into China’s massive online ecosystem, enabling direct merchandise sales, subscription models, and engagement funnels all within a single digital sphere. This fusion of AI, cloud infrastructure, and e-commerce marks China as the NBA’s high-value, high-tech market one focused on retention and monetization, rather than audience acquisition.
India: The Long Game of Scale and Culture
If China is about deep integration, India is about deep cultivation.
Between 2020 and 2025, the NBA’s Indian operations took a dramatically different route emphasizing accessibility, digital reach, and youth engagement over immediate monetization. The results have been remarkable: the 2022–23 season became the NBA’s most-watched ever in India, crossing 100 million unique viewers across linear, digital, and social platforms. That milestone wasn’t achieved through billion-dollar tech partnerships, but through smart distribution deals and localized storytelling.
The league’s multi-year partnership with Viacom18, leveraging the reach of JioCinema, enabled millions to stream NBA games on their phones for free or at minimal cost. The approach was simple but effective meet fans where they already are.
Digital consumption surged 12x year-on-year, while total watch time rose by 50 percent. On social media, localized channels generated 1.3 billion video views a 209 percent jump. The Hindi commentary initiative, covering 112 games, expanded the league’s reach to 33 million viewers, while even children’s programming like Happy & Pinaki on Nickelodeon Sonic helped introduce basketball fundamentals to 11 million young fans.
The demographic data tells the story of a market being shaped, not captured. More than half (53%) of NBA viewers in India are under 30, and 45% are women rare statistics in Indian sports viewership. The league is building its second-generation audience, one that didn’t grow up watching Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant but is discovering basketball through mobile screens, memes, and highlight reels. Beyond screens, the Jr. NBA program, powered by the Reliance Foundation, anchors the grassroots movement. Since 2013, it has reached over 14 million youth across 35 cities and trained 15,000 physical education instructors.
The ACG Jr. NBA 3v3 tournament continues to be India’s largest school-based basketball event, while NBA Academy India, based in Delhi NCR, develops elite prospects like Princepal Singh and Sanjana Ramesh, who’ve gone on to international careers. This dual-track development mass education at the base and elite incubation at the top embodies the NBA’s “patience-first” model. It’s a long-term bet on India’s youth, digital accessibility, and slow but steady shift toward basketball as an aspirational urban sport.
Different Markets, Different Mandates
What separates China and India isn’t just GDP or fan size it’s market maturity.
China is a monetization market. With a well-established fanbase and deep digital penetration, the NBA’s focus there is on value extraction premium experiences, AI personalization, and direct-to-consumer monetization through e-commerce. The partnership with Alibaba Cloud, in this sense, isn’t just technological it’s strategic insurance against future political and infrastructural risks.
India, on the other hand, is a cultivation market. The focus is not on ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) but on audience reach and cultural imprint. By keeping basketball free, local, and mobile-first, the NBA is trading short-term revenue for long-term loyalty. The league knows that to compete with cricket, it must build a culture before it builds a market.
The Future of the NBA’s Global Play
Together, the China and India playbooks showcase the NBA’s new global DNA flexible, tech-savvy, and locally attuned. In China, it’s about protecting a mature market through innovation and geopolitical pragmatism. In India, it’s about nurturing a future market through accessibility and education. The approaches are different, but the destination is the same: sustainable global fandom.
As one NBA executive put it recently, “We don’t replicate success we localize it.”
That localization has made the NBA one of the few Western sports properties capable of adapting to two of the world’s most complex markets. In China, it builds digital empires; in India, it plants cultural seeds. One runs on AI, the other on aspiration both vital for the league’s global legacy.
