HONG KONG — Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce titan, has always had a capricious streak when it comes to strategic investments and acquisitions.

In the past two years, it has put money into insurance and finance, motion pictures, brick-and-mortar retail and even a soccer franchise.

Now it is cooperating with yet another unlikely partner: a Chinese state-owned arms and machinery producer, the China North Industries Corporation, or Norinco.

In a statement on its website on Wednesday, Norinco said each of the two would hold a stake of 50 percent in a joint venture worth 2 billion renminbi, or about $310 million, Qianxun Weizhi Internet.

Norinco — which has faced nonproliferation sanctions from the United States government over the past decade — appears to be an odd partner for Alibaba. But the cooperation shows how China’s largest Internet companies are trying to improve government relations by supporting state projects.

In this case, that project is China’s domestically developed answer to GPS, called Beidou.

The new company, according to the post, will build applications and technology supporting and working with the satellite navigation system. It will also show Alibaba’s support of broader Chinese industrial policy.

Beidou has high-level government support and has attracted billions in investment, partly because of Beijing’s concerns that the United States could disable GPS signals in China, damaging the capabilities of its satellite-guided weapons.

To ensure the viability of Beidou, the Chinese government has sought to increase the number of commercial users of the technology, even though the system is not yet complete and GPS has a 95 percent share of the Chinese market.

The Chinese authorities have been slowly rolling out new rules that mandate its use. In 2013, the country’s transportation authority ordered all long-distance buses and vehicles transporting “dangerous articles” in nine provinces to install the system. Heavy trucks must also have the system, and the government has installed it in more than 50,000 Chinese fishing boats.

“Alibaba Group participated in this location-based services project in light of our strength in cloud computing and big data,” Alibaba’s spokeswoman, Melanie Lee, wrote in an email. “We hope to be able to provide businesses and developers with better location-based services.”

In the early 2000s, Norinco was hit with sanctions by the Bush administration for the transfer of dual-use technologies to a company involved in Iran’s ballistic missile program. According to the State Department, the sanctions lapsed in the mid-2000s.

Norinco is one of China’s largest arms exporters and more recently attracted headlines when it delivered the first part of an arms shipment to South Sudan last summer. The Chinese government halted the remainder of the order.