The stock of tech giant Alibaba — whose shares had been beaten down since Beijing's yearslong Big Tech regulatory crackdown — has soared 38% this year so far in Hong Kong. The stock's dual listing on the New York Stock Exchange is up 33%.

Alibaba Group’s stock surged up to 8.6% following reports about Apple linking up with the e-commerce giant to roll out AI features for iPhone users in China. For Alibaba, securing a deal with Apple is no less than a breakthrough.

Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) model is powering the world's top 10 open-source large language models (LLMs), according to collaborative machine-learning platform and community Hugging Face.

Stanford’s S1 and Berkeley’s TinyZero are two examples of how researchers are increasingly using Alibaba tech to lower AI training costs.

There’s been an escalation in the generative AI large language model “wars” as Alibaba Qwen 2.5 launched Wednesday. This latest AI salvo from China-based Alibaba is directly aimed at its in-country rival DeepSeek, which launched its own AI — DeepSeek-V3 — in December and its R1 version earlier this month.