NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of Alibaba Group Holding (BABA) - Get Report are climbing, up 0.62% to $82.50 in pre-market trading Thursday, as the Chinese e-commerce company plans to invest $200 million in Snapchat as it builds up mobile services, according to Bloomberg.

TheStreet's Jim Cramer, Portfolio Manager of the Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio says, "Look, if you want to invest in BABA may I suggest that you buy Yahoo! (YHOO) not BABA, because after Yahoo! spins off BABA it will be too darned cheap!"

Snapchat is now one of the highest valued start-ups at $15 billion, up from the $3 billion Facebook (FB) - Get Report offered in 2013 to buy the photo-messaging app.

Alibaba, which handles more online commerce than Amazon.com (AMZN) - Get Report and eBay (EBAY) - Get Report combined, may use Snapchat as a payment service to bridge the gap between consumers and merchants in China and the U.S., Bloomberg added.

Last November, Snapchat introduced a payment service to let its users send money to each other as part of a partnership with online payments company Square.

Snapchat has more than 100 million users that use the mobile app to send messages that disappear in seconds.

Also, Alibaba Group is looking to hire cloud computing talent from Seattle, home of rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft (MSFT) - Get Report as it focuses on building up its U.S. operations, Reuters reports.

Alibaba is hunting staff in Silicon Valley and Seattle, where it opened a research and development center late last year, close to Microsoft and Amazon, Reuters noted.

Alibaba is a China-based online and mobile commerce company in retail and wholesale trade, as well as cloud computing and other services.

Shares closed at $81.99 yesterday.

BABA data by YCharts