Alibaba Shares Soar as New AI Model QwQ-32B Challenges DeepSeek R1

Alibaba rallies on new open-source AI model to rival DeepSeek By Investing.com

Investing.com-- Alibaba's Hong Kong shares rose sharply on Thursday, leading a rally in their Chinese peers after the e-commerce giant released a new open source artificial intelligence model that rivaled DeepSeek. Alibaba (NYSE:BABA)(HK:9988) surged 7.3% to HK$139.60 and was in sight of highs last seen in late-2021. The stock was the biggest boost to Hong Kong's Hang Seng index, which jumped over 1%. Alibaba on Thursday open-sourced its recently unveiled QwQ-32B AI model- which the company claims rivals DeepSeek R1 in performance while using a fraction of the latter's data requirements. The model was released by Alibaba's Qwen division, which is developing the company's most advanced reasoning AI models. QwQ- short for Quan-with-Questions- was first released in November 2024 to compete with OpenAI's o1 reasoning AI model. But the model sat in relative obscurity until the release of DeepSeek R1 earlier this year, which shone a renewed light on China's AI efforts. Alibaba is at the forefront of these efforts, with its new QwQ model aimed largely at competing with DeepSeek. Early testing of the model showed that it was capable of matching, or even surpassing DeepSeek's reasoning capabilities, while using a fraction of the latter's data requirements. Alibaba leads China tech rally amid stimulus cheer China said it will unlock even more stimulus in the coming months, including continued subsidies for electronics purchases and more measures aimed at boosting personal consumption. Chinese stocks, particularly large tech names in Hong Kong, have been on a tear since late-January, with the release of DeepSeek. The AI model disrupted U.S. markets and sparked increased bets that China was still in the AI race. A host of Chinese tech majors have rushed to release similar or competitive offerings in the wake of DeepSeek's release, with Alibaba at the forefront of this rush.

Alibaba Soars 7% On AI Push As China Pledges To 'Vigorously Boost' Spending -- Hang Seng Reaches 2-Year High - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA), Alibaba Gr Hldgs (OTC:BABAF)

Hong Kong stocks surged Thursday morning, with the Hang Seng Index climbing 2.5% to 24,183.07, reaching its highest level since January 2022 and extending its year-to-date gains to 23.37%. What Happened: Chinese tech giants led the rally on Hong Kong Exchange, with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA BABAF rallying 7.24% to 139.30 HKD ($17.93) and Tencent Holdings Ltd TCEHY jumping 5.84% to 534.00 HKD ($68.72). Other major tech firms also posted substantial gains, including Baidu Inc BIDU up 3.83% to 90.80 HKD ($11.68), JD.com Inc JDCMF rising 4.06% to 171.20 HKD ($22.03), and Meituan MPNGY advancing 4.08% at 179.50 HKD ($23.10). The market rally follows Premier Li Qiang's announcement of increased fiscal stimulus during China's annual parliamentary meeting on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Li pledged to "vigorously boost" sluggish consumption and cushion impacts from escalating U.S. trade tensions, while maintaining China's 5% growth target for 2025. "An increasingly complex and severe external environment may exert a greater impact on China in areas such as trade, science, and technology," Li warned, addressing what he called "changes unseen in a century." See Also: NBA Legend Shaq Says His Net Worth 'Quadrupled' Once He Took Note From Jeff Bezos And Started Investing In Things That 'Change People's Lives' Why It Matters: Beijing plans to issue 1.3 trillion yuan ($179 billion) in ultra-long special treasury bonds this year, up from 1 trillion yuan in 2024, and will allow local governments to issue 4.4 trillion yuan in special debt. The budget deficit is projected to widen to around 4% of GDP. Investors seem particularly enthused by China's AI ambitions, with Li promising to foster artificial intelligence applications across electric vehicles, smartphones, and robots. Market sentiment has been bolstered by the recent emergence of AI platform Deepseek, with Alibaba also announcing its new QwQ-32B reasoning model today. Read Next: Mark Cuban Was Asked How He'd Invest $100K -- His Answer? Buy Bulk Toothpaste And Soup For The 'Best Guaranteed Return On Investment' Image Via Shutterstock Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$141.859.24%OverviewBABAFAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$16.34-0.94%BIDUBaidu Inc$92.365.98%JDCMFJD.com Inc$23.509.66%MPNGYMeituan$45.208.03%TCEHYTencent Holdings Ltd$67.556.54%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Alibaba shares surge after launch of new AI model to rival DeepSeek's R1

Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed stock surged 8.39 percent to a 52-week high following the announcement of its AI reasoning model -- QwQ-32B. The company stated that the model competes with DeepSeek's R1. The new model has greater efficiency, further cementing Alibaba's AI-fueled growth strategy. Experts anticipate AI breakthroughs would further accelerate the company's stock and earnings trajectory.Stock prices of the Alibaba group surged on Thursday after the conglomerate introduced QwQ-32B, a new artificial intelligence model. The AI reasoning model has claimed that it can compete with DeepSeek-R1, a breakthrough model that has reshaped the AI landscape. In Hong Kong, Alibaba's stock climbed by 8.39 percent and reached a 52-week high. Meanwhile, New York-listed shares rose by 2.5 percent in premarket trading. The company's stock has gained nearly 71 percent in Hong Kong year-to-date. This reflects a strong investor optimism around its AI initiatives. Operating with only 32 billion parameters, Alibaba's QwQ-32B is not directly comparable to DeepSeek's 671 billion parameters. However, its unrivalled reasoning ability is completely within reach as efficiency is fine-tuned, a CNBC report stated. According to the report, in the AI sector where cost-effective solutions are the name of the game, lower parameter counts mean a higher resource efficiency, which alone can be a noticeable advantage. Also Read : Is the US prepared to host World Cup 2026? Here are the challenges it could face Alibaba's QwQ-32B has achieved impressive results and is expected to keep getting better, especially in math and coding, the company said. Since the launch of DeepSeek-R1, AI companies around the world have been competing to build faster and more efficient models. Chinese firms like Alibaba are pushing their AI capabilities aggressively and are seeing it as a major driver of growth going forward. Alibaba has been investing a lot in AI, with its Cloud Intelligence Group contributing greatly to the firm's profit rise in the December quarter. The report added that CEO Eddie Wu remarked that AI-led revenue growth in cloud computing will continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Bernstein analysts are of the view that Alibaba's AI innovations have the potential to drive earnings higher. Meanwhile, Futurum Group CEO Dan Newman told CNBC that competition in AI was heating up. He pointed out that AI models are becoming "commoditised", so efficiency and cost savings are key. With AI leaving the training phase behind, attention is turning towards inference or real-time usage of artificial intelligence. This shift is set to drastically scale up AI adoption for the benefit of companies like Alibaba that are leading in creating and implementing AI models. Also Read : Bitcoin's price soars again; experts suggest it could reach $1 million by year end What is Alibaba's QwQ-32B model? Alibaba's QwQ-32B is the latest AI reasoning framework that aims to rival DeepSeek-R1 with greater efficiency and fewer parameters. Why did Alibaba's stock go up? Alibaba shares jumped after it revealed its AI achievement, which may expand cloud sales and fuel AI-led growth.

Alibaba Shares Jump 7% After Unveiling Latest DeepSeek Contender

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s stock surged the most in weeks after taking the wraps off a model that it claims performs as well as DeepSeek with just a fraction of the data required. China's e-commerce leader, which in 2025 jumped to the forefront of the domestic AI sector with highly benchmarked models, on Thursday open-sourced the QwQ-32B model. The platform marked a big leap over the previous version using roughly 5% of the parameters, or data units, that DeepSeek's R1 employs.

Alibaba shares surge after launch of new DeepSeek competitor

BEIJING (AFP) - Alibaba shares surged more than seven per cent in Hong Kong trade on Thursday after the Chinese tech giant launched an artificial intelligence model it says can compete with DeepSeek, this year's surprise tech star. Investors have been riding high on China's AI capabilities since January, when DeepSeek unveiled a state-of-the-art chatbot seemingly at a fraction of the cost assumed necessary by Western industry leaders. Alibaba says its newest AI model announced on Thursday morning, called QwQ-32B, has a "comparable performance" to DeepSeek while also requiring far less data to run. Shares in the e-commerce powerhouse rose more than seven per cent before a midday pause in trading at Hong Kong's Stock Exchange. China's vast tech industry has enjoyed several weeks of revamped market confidence. Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma was seen meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping at a symposium for the country's leading business figures last month, ending years out of the spotlight. The billionaire entrepreneur had criticised government regulations in late 2020, shortly before Beijing scuttled Alibaba's imminent blockbuster IPO. A broader regulatory crackdown that followed wiped more than a trillion dollars off the value of China's major tech firms. But Ma's inclusion in last month's meeting hinted at his potential public rehabilitation following his tangle with regulators. DeepSeek's arrival on the scene this year has pleased authorities, who have intensified efforts to revitalise lacklustre activity in the world's second-largest economy in recent months. Alibaba's QwQ-32B joins another recent entrant, Tencent's Yuanbao, in an enhanced domestic rivalry with DeepSeek. In a potential boost for the firm, Beijing promised on Wednesday to enhance support for consumption, which has been sluggish in China since the Covid-19 pandemic. Hangzhou-based Alibaba -- operator of some of China's top online shopping platforms -- said last month it planned to spend more than USD50 billion on AI and cloud computing over the next three years.

Alibaba shares surge after it unveils reasoning model

BEIJING (Reuters) - The Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba Group surged more than 8% on Thursday following the release of a new reasoning model that the company said was on par with global hit DeepSeek's R1. Qwen, the e-commerce leader's artificial intelligence unit, said on X that its QwQ-32B, with 32 billion parameters, can achieve performance comparable to DeepSeek's R1 model, which boasts 671 billion parameters. The announcement came a day after the Chinese government pledged increased support for industries including artificial intelligence, humanoid robots and 6G telecom, as AI models see increasing adoption by government agencies and smaller companies in China. Alibaba said the new model is accessible via its chatbot service, Qwen Chat, for which users can choose various Qwen models including Qwen2.5-Max, the most powerful language model in the Qwen series. The firm said the QwQ-32B demonstrated capabilities in mathematical reasoning, coding and general problem-solving in benchmark tests, performing close to top models such as OpenAI's o1 mini and DeepSeek's R1. DeepSeek has emerged as the new poster child of China's AI prowess, rivaling top models from OpenAI for a fraction of its costs with less powerful computing. Analysts said initiatives laid out by the government will expand usage of AI in China. "China is rapidly building an application-driven AI ecosystem that isn't just about research -- it's about immediate, tangible economic impact," said Sun Wei, principal AI analyst at research company Counterpoint. (Reporting by Che Pan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala)

Alibaba Expands AI Push With New QwQ-32B Model Taking on DeepSeek In China's AI Race - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA)

On Thursday, Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba Group Holding BABA launched a new reasoning model comparable to that of its affordable rival DeepSeek's R1, Reuters reports. Alibaba Qwen artificial intelligence unit tweeted that its QwQ-32B, with 32 billion parameters, can achieve performance comparable to DeepSeek's R1 model. On Wednesday, China pledged increased support for industries including AI, humanoid robots, and 6G telecom, as AI models noted growing adoption by government agencies and smaller companies in China. Also Read: Taiwan Semiconductor Caught Between US Tariff Threats and Taiwan's Push To Keep Advanced Chip Tech Alibaba said the new model is accessible via its chatbot service, Qwen Chat. Users can choose various Qwen models and demonstrate mathematical reasoning, coding, and general problem-solving capabilities in benchmark tests. Analysts told Reuters that government initiatives will expand usage of AI in China. Beijing plans to issue 1.3 trillion yuan ($179 billion) in ultra-long special treasury bonds in 2025, up from 1 trillion yuan in 2024. It will allow local governments to issue 4.4 trillion yuan in special debt. The budget deficit will likely widen to around 4% of GDP. Alibaba was among the first major global tech companies to open-source its large-scale AI models. Alibaba committed $53 billion to cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years. DeepSeek's AI model price war offers developers discounted off-peak pricing. Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and its rivals were already engaged in a price war to win market share. Benchmark's Fawne Jiang hailed Alibaba as a leading player in China's AI sector, backed by its edge in infrastructure, proprietary models, and application capacity across diverse use cases. Price Action: BABA stock closed higher by 8.61% at $141.03 on Wednesday. Also Read: Applovin Reportedly Selling Gaming Unit To Tripledot Studios In $900-Million Deal Photo by jackpress via Shutterstock BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$144.142.21%OverviewMarket News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

What's Going On With Alibaba Stock Thursday? - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA)

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA shares are trading higher Thursday after Alibaba Cloud introduced a new compact reasoning AI model. What Happened: In a new blog post on Thursday, Alibaba Cloud announced QwQ-32B, a compact reasoning model with 32 billion parameters that delivers performance comparable to other larger models like OpenAI's o1-mini and DeepSeek's R1. The large language model has demonstrated strong performance across multiple measures including AIME 24 (mathematical reasoning), Live CodeBench (coding proficiency), LiveBench (test set contamination and objective evaluation), IFEval (instruction-following ability) and BFCL (tool and function-calling capabilities). Alibaba noted that reinforcement learning is the core technique behind the model. Through the continuous leveraging of reinforcement learning scaling, QwQ-32B has shown improvements in mathematical reasoning and coding proficiency. The model was also trained to better handle instructions, align with human preferences and offer improved agent performance. Related Link: ChatGPT Parent OpenAI's Specialized AI Agents Could Cost Up To $20 Thousand Per Month "The research team has also integrated agent-related capabilities into QwQ-32B, enabling it to think critically, utilize tools effectively, and adapt its reasoning based on environmental feedback. The team is also exploring further integration of agents with RL to enable long-horizon reasoning, aiming to unlock even greater intelligence through inference-time scaling," the company said in the blog post. QwQ-32B is currently available for free download as an open-source model on Hugging Face and Model Scope. It's also accessible through Qwen Chat. The news comes after Alibaba shares rallied more than 8.5% on Wednesday. Premier Li Qiang announced increased fiscal stimulus in a speech at the annual meeting of China's parliament this week. Li reportedly pledged to "vigorously boost" sluggish consumption to keep China on a path towards its 5% growth target in 2025, which may be helping fuel some of the continued momentum. BABA Price Action: Alibaba shares are up approximately 66% year-to-date. The stock was up 0.79% at $142.14 at the time of publication Thursday, according to Benzinga Pro. Read Next: Alibaba Soars 7% On AI Push As China Pledges To 'Vigorously Boost' Spending -- Hang Seng Reaches 2-Year High Photo: courtesy of Alibaba. BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$143.471.73%OverviewMarket News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Alibaba shares surge after it unveils reasoning model

BEIJING, March 6 (Reuters) - The Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba Group (9988.HK), opens new tab surged more than 8% on Thursday following the release of a new reasoning model that the company said was on par with global hit DeepSeek's R1. Qwen, the e-commerce leader's artificial intelligence unit, said on X that its QwQ-32B, with 32 billion parameters, can achieve performance comparable to DeepSeek's R1 model, which boasts 671 billion parameters. The announcement came a day after the Chinese government pledged increased support for industries including artificial intelligence, humanoid robots and 6G telecom, as AI models see increasing adoption by government agencies and smaller companies in China. Alibaba said the new model is accessible via its chatbot service, Qwen Chat, for which users can choose various Qwen models including Qwen2.5-Max, the most powerful language model in the Qwen series. The firm said the QwQ-32B demonstrated capabilities in mathematical reasoning, coding and general problem-solving in benchmark tests, performing close to top models such as OpenAI's o1 mini and DeepSeek's R1. DeepSeek has emerged as the new poster child of China's AI prowess, rivaling top models from OpenAI for a fraction of its costs with less powerful computing. Analysts said initiatives laid out by the government will expand usage of AI in China. "China is rapidly building an application-driven AI ecosystem that isn't just about research -- it's about immediate, tangible economic impact," said Sun Wei, principal AI analyst at research company Counterpoint. Alibaba's shares surged 8% to HK$140.5 a share. Reporting by Che Pan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence Brenda Goh Thomson Reuters Brenda Goh is Reuters' Shanghai bureau chief and oversees coverage of corporates in China. Brenda joined Reuters as a trainee in London in 2010 and has reported stories from over a dozen countries.

Alibaba Unveils AI Model To Rival DeepSeek

Listen on the go! A daily podcast of Wall Street Breakfast will be available by 8:00 a.m. on Seeking Alpha, iTunes, Spotify. Chinese companies are continuing to make big strides in artificial intelligence, as Alibaba (BABA) unveiled its latest reasoning model with fewer parameters than existing models. Alibaba claims that the new model more or less matched the performance of DeepSeek's R1 breakthrough and OpenAI's cost-efficient o1 mini. What's new: Alibaba's new model, called QwQ-32B, was developed with 32B parameters (referring to the training data that enables the model to generate desired outputs). The company's Qwen team evaluated the model across a range of benchmarks to assess its mathematical reasoning, coding and general problem-solving. The team claimed QwQ-32B can achieve performance comparable to DeepSeek's R1, which boasts 671B parameters. The launch sent the company's Hong Kong-listed shares soaring 8.4% on Thursday, while its ADRs (BABA) are up 3% premarket in the U.S. The new model comes as Alibaba announced a commitment to invest more than $52B in its cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years. This major investment would exceed the tech giant's total AI and cloud spending over the past decade. Bigger picture: Another notable release from China is the new general AI agent called Manus, which claims to outperform OpenAI's Deep Research on some metrics when performing tasks. The launches this week follow the Chinese government's pledge to step up support for emerging technologies such as AI and quantum computing, ensuring self-sufficiency. These new developments indicate that China is gaining steam in the global AI race, and is showing no signs of slowing down.

China needs to boost its tech sector more than ever. How to play it

Chinese tech companies raced to launch new products in a week that saw Beijing double down on its calls to support artificial intelligence. An obscure Chinese startup that goes by the name Monica on Wednesday announced an invite-only AI application called Manus that claims to streamline analysis of resumes and financial information using several models from companies such as OpenAI, DeepSeek and Anthropic. "The innovation is probably not as significant as DeepSeek," in our view, Nomura China technology analyst Bing Duan and a team wrote Thursday. "However, we believe this product is yet another example of China's accelerated AI innovation." "We believe that the AI infrastructure investment upcycle has started in China's AI value chain, which should benefit from leading suppliers exposed to China's major Internet/Telecom companies' capex on cloud and AI infrastructure," the analysts said. Three of their picks are mainland China-listed printed circuit board companies that have partnerships with China AI tech leaders, according to Nomura: Shennan Circuits, Shengyi Technology and WUS PCB. The firm also likes Shenzhen-listed Accelink for its position as a leading supplier of optical transceivers which can facilitate the high-speed data transmissions needed to develop AI. Nomura rates all four stocks as buys. Tech's leadership in Chinese stocks As China faces increased tariffs and slowing economic growth, policymakers in the last week announced a rare increase in its deficit -- along with plans to ramp up subsidies for consumer trade-ins and financing for tech companies. Several senior officials publicly lauded the rise of DeepSeek AI, and they emphasized how restrictions have only pushed Chinese companies to work harder on tech. The messaging on technology is "encouraging, a strong signal to support both innovation and the private sector," Nicholas Yeo, head of China equities at abrdn, said in a note. "With valuations of the internet sector cheap relative to U.S. counterparts, alongside the support of the authorities to boost the nation's AI capabilities, we think this remain a very attractive opportunity for investors," he said. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index gained 5.6% last week while hitting a three-year high. The CSI 300 fell by about 1.4% for the week. Tech has led most of the recent gains in Chinese stocks, which is reflected in the outperformance of the Hang Seng Index versus mainland Chinese stocks, known as A shares, said Aaron Costello, head of Asia at Cambridge Associates. He pointed out that most major Chinese tech names are traded in Hong Kong. If China's stimulus starts to see economic results, A shares should see another leg up as gains broaden out, he said. Tencent and AI Helping the Hang Seng Index's gains was a surge in Alibaba's Hong Kong-traded shares to a new 52-week high. The e-commerce company revealed a new AI reasoning model that it claims performs just as well as DeepSeek's R1 model. Tencent , also traded in Hong Kong, a week earlier launched the latest version of its Hunyuan AI model, Turbo S, which claims to beat DeepSeek V3 , OpenAI's GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Llama 3.1 on certain key metrics such as MMLU, Math and Chinese. Tencent also released a new T1 reasoning model based on the Turbo S. The T1 is currently accessible through the Yuanbao app, which says it also offers DeepSeek access. "We'd argue the last few weeks have presented ample evidence in favor of Tencent's ability to productionize AI," Bernstein China Internet analyst Robin Zhu and a team said in a report Wednesday that named Tencent their top China AI play. "Tencent's recent moves on implementing DeepSeek within its family of apps make it clear that this was one of the times Tencent's top management decided the troops must be rallied for a common goal," the analysts said. "The company has moved quickly to implement DeepSeek across its family of digital ecosystems -- including WeChat and AI assistant Yuanbao, but also Peacekeeper Elite within the video gaming portfolio." The Bernstein analysts raised their price target on Tencent to 640 Hong Kong dollars, up from 540 HKD, for upside of 20% from Friday's close. The firm rates the stock overweight. "Tencent's AI assistant Yuanbao is now being downloaded at a faster rate than both Bytedance's Doubao and the DeepSeek app," the analysts said. "Social advertising is a tried and tested monetisation pathway for AI advancements, and Yuanbao growth potentially sets up a larger search ads business over time." Tencent is set to release quarterly results on March 19. -- CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed to this report.

Alibaba Chair Says AI Total Addressable Market Is $10 Trillion, Expects Benefits Via Its Cloud Business - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA)

On Wednesday, Alibaba Group Holding BABA Chairman Joe Tsai voiced the possibility of artificial intelligence eliminating the need for equity research analysts while charting a Nvidia Corp NVDA or Apple Inc AAPL report at CNBC's CONVERGE LIVE event in Singapore. Tsai told CNBC that AI could enhance the quality of work by taking care of tedious research-related tasks, enabling better recommendations from human minds instead of eliminating the analyst roles. Tsai also said he expects AI to fundamentally change the practice of law. He expects AI to efficiently chart out a contract, enhancing lawyer judgment instead of eliminating it. Also Read: DeepSeek Wants To Stay Free As Of Now, Founder Rejects Monetization He told CNBC that AI's total addressable market is at least $10 trillion, making it bigger than industries like transportation and healthcare insurance. Tsai expects Alibaba to benefit from this upsurge of AI thanks to its cloud computing business. Tsai told CNBC that Alibaba could also benefit significantly from AI within its own business. Recent reports indicated Alibaba's XuanTie C930 processor's potential to broaden domestic use of open-source chips built on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The new XuanTie processors designed for AI acceleration, automotive applications, and high-speed interconnection will ship to clients in March. Last week, Alibaba also launched a new reasoning model comparable to DeepSeek's R1. Alibaba was among the first major global tech companies to open-source its large-scale AI models. Over the next three years, Alibaba committed $53 billion to cloud and AI infrastructure. Alibaba Stock Prediction For 2025 Equity research analysts on and off Wall Street typically use earnings growth and fundamental research as a form of valuation and forecasting. But many in trading turn to technical analysis as a way to form predictive models for share price trajectory. Some investors look to trends to help forecast where they believe a stock could trade at a certain point in the future. Looking at Alibaba, an investor could make an assessment about a stock's long term prospects using a moving average and trend line. If they believe a stock will remain above the moving average, which many believe is a bullish signal, they can extrapolate that trend into the future using a trend line. For Alibaba Gr Hldgs, the 200-day moving average sits at $91.41, according to Benzinga Pro, which is below the current price of $139.02. For more on charts and trend lines, see a description here. Traders believe that when a stock is above its moving average, it is a generally bullish signal, and when it crosses below, it is a more negative signal. Investors could use trend lines to make an educated guess about where a stock could trade at a later date if conditions remain stable. Price Action: BABA stock is down 0.35% at $138.54 premarket at last check Wednesday. Also Read: ASML Boosts AI Chip R&D In Europe Amid US Sanctions, China Slowdown, And Subsidy Uncertainty Photo by Ascannio via Shutterstock BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$139.00-0.01%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum96.47Growth65.09Quality63.89Value77.38Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewAAPLApple Inc$221.050.10%NVDANVIDIA Corp$113.214.10%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Jack Ma, Xi Jinping, And The $53B AI Bet -- Alibaba's Comeback Signals A New Era For Chinese Big Tech - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Alibaba Group Holding BABA is making waves in the AI space with its new artificial intelligence model, QwQ-32B. Developed by its AI unit, Qwen, this model has 32 billion parameters and claims performance comparable to DeepSeek's R1 model which has 671 billion parameters. This is in line with China's broader push to support key industries such as AI, humanoid robots and 6G. Alibaba's Big Bet on AI After the QwQ-32B announcement, Alibaba's Hong Kong shares surged over 8% and this year is up nearly 70%. As of March 9, the company's market cap is around $345 billion, according to Companies MarketCap. Alibaba's AI strategy is gaining traction. Don't Miss: This 12,000 RPM Spinning Battery With Over $100 Million In LOIs Could Be The Missing Link For Green Energy -- Here's Why Early Investors Are Flocking To Invest Before Funding Closes BlackRock is calling 2025 the year of alternative assets. One firm from NYC has quietly built a group of 60,000+ investors who have all joined in on an alt asset class previously exclusive to billionaires like Bezos and Gates. According to Qwen, although QwQ-32B has fewer parameters than DeepSeek's R1, it excels in mathematical reasoning, coding and problem solving. This means operational cost savings and Alibaba is more competitive in the AI race. According to Alibaba Cloud, the company is also working with tech firms to put AI into consumer devices so its advancements can reach a broader audience. Alibaba's top leaders have been meeting with Chinese government officials, including a meeting between President Xi Jinping and Jack Ma, Alibaba's co-founder. This level of engagement means strong government support for China's tech sector and its comeback. Beijing's backing is a big reason for Alibaba's aggressive investment in AI. Alibaba Group announced a plan to invest $53 billion for cloud computing and AI infrastructure. CEO Eddie Wu called AI a "once in a generation" opportunity that can replicate both intellectual and physical labor globally. Trending: Dogecoin millionaires are increasing - investors with $1M+ in DOGE revealed! Financially, Alibaba Cloud is reflecting this AI-first approach with 11% year-over-year revenue growth and AI related product revenue up triple digits for the sixth quarter in a row. Alibaba is not alone in going all in on AI. According to Digitaltrends, Amazon Web Services is planning to spend around $100 billion next year, mostly on AI initiatives while Microsoft MSFT is expected to spend around $80 billion with a big chunk on AI development. But experts are concerned. Despite QwQ-32B's efficiency, researchers wonder if smaller models can manage the intricacies of the actual world just as effectively as larger models. Small models may struggle with tasks that require extensive contextual understanding, which larger models do better. See Also: If You're Age 35, 50, or 60: Here's How Much You Should Have Saved Vs. Invested By Now Alibaba's QwQ-32B is a big deal in AI, but as competition heats up and concerns grow the question is how do we make sure AI serves technological progress and societal well-being. The rapid development of AI without ethics is raising big concerns of unintended consequences, including decision making bias and job displacement. According to The Guardian, recent rollbacks of AI-related labor protections in the US has made workers more vulnerable to automation job losses and deteriorating employment conditions. Experts warn that without proper regulations, companies will prioritise efficiency over human labor, perpetuating economic inequality and embedding biases into AI systems. Read Next: The secret weapon in billionaire investor portfolios that you almost certainly don't own yet. See which asset class has outpaced the S&P 500 (1995-2024) - and with near-zero correlation. Many are surprised by Mark Cuban's advice for lotto winners: Cash or annuity? BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$135.73-2.37%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum96.47Growth65.09Quality63.89Value77.38Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewMSFTMicrosoft Corp$382.390.51%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Alibaba shares soar after Chinese tech giant unveils new DeepSeek rival

The Alibaba office building is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, on Aug 28, 2024. Alibaba shares surged on Wednesday after the Chinese behemoth revealed a new reasoning model it claims can rival DeepSeek's global blockbuster R1. Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba ended the Thursday session up 8.39% -- hitting a new 52-week high -- with the company's New York-trading stock rising around 2.5% in premarket deals. Alibaba shares have gained nearly 71% in Hong Kong in the year to date. The Chinese giant on Thursday unveiled QwQ-32B, its latest AI reasoning model, which it said "rivals cutting-edge reasoning model, e.g., DeepSeek-R1." Alibaba's QwQ-32B operates with 32 billion parameters compared to DeepSeek's 671 billion parameters with 37 billion parameters actively engaged during inference -- the process of running live data through a trained AI model in order to generate a prediction or tackle a task. Parameters are variables that large language models (LLMs) -- AI systems that can understand and generate human language -- pick up during training and use in prediction and decision-making. A lower volume of parameters typically signals higher efficiency amid increasing demand for optimized AI that consumes fewer resources. Alibaba said its new model achieved "impressive results" and the company can "continuously improve the performance especially in math and coding." Both established and emerging AI players around the world are racing to produce more efficient and higher-performance models since the unexpected launch of DeepSeek's revolutionary R1 earlier this year. Chinese firms have been doubling down on the technology with Alibaba investing in AI after debuting its first model in 2023. The strength of the company's cloud Intelligence unit was a key contributor to Alibaba's sharp profit hike in the December quarter. "Looking ahead, revenue growth at Cloud Intelligence Group driven by AI will continue to accelerate," Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said at the time. Optimism surrounding AI developments could lead to large gains for Alibaba stock and set the company's earnings "on a more upwardly-pointing trajectory," Bernstein analysts said. "The pace of innovation is incredibly fast right now. It's really good for the world to see this happening," Futurum Group CEO Dan Newman told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Thursday. "When DeepSeek came out, it made everyone sort of question, was OpenAi the final answer? Would the incumbents, the Microsofts, the Googles, or the Amazons that have all made massive investments win?" He stressed that the large language models were increasingly "becoming commoditized" as developers look to drive down costs and improve access to users. "As we see this more efficiency, this cost coming down, we're also going to see use going off. The training era, which is what Nvidia really built its initial AI boom off, was a big moment," Newman said. "But the inference, the consumption of AI, is really the future and this is going to exponentially increase that volume."

Alibaba's 8% Surge on Renewed Optimism in China's Tech Sector

Alibaba's share price climbed 8% on Thursday as the company's latest AI release coincided with mounting optimism in the Chinese tech sector. Credit: Pexels. The release of Alibaba's latest Qwen AI model drove the company's share price to jump 8% on Thursday, March 6. The 32 billion parameter reasoning model, QwQ-32B , is positioned as a competitor to DeepSeek R1 and reflects China's emerging dominance in the open-source, small to midsized model market. Alibaba's Answer to DeepSeek R1 While AI developers once boasted about their models' performance compared to OpenAI models, Alibaba highlights how it performs against DeepSeek R1. The new Qwen model beats DeepSeek's 32 billion parameter model on all relevant benchmarks and is on par with the full-sized R1-671B. The team behind QwQ-32B attributed its improved performance to reinforcement learning techniques similar to those used by DeepSeek to develop the R1 model. R1 itself is based on an older Qwen model, and the productive exchanges between the two companies showcase the value of open-source research and development. Other Factors Besides the launch of QwQ-32B, broader political and economic factors have also lifted Chinese stocks across the board. During the government's annual "two sessions," policymakers in Beijing signaled their intention to ramp up consumption and unlock additional fiscal stimulus. China's Big Tech Rally Continues Alibaba's latest price jump builds on a bullish run for Chinese Big Tech firms. Alibaba stock has risen over 40% in the past month, while Tencent stock has climbed nearly 30% in the same period. Even Baidu, which has failed to generate the same AI buzz as its peers, has gained around 10% since the start of the year. In contrast, the U.S.'s biggest tech stocks -- Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google -- all traded below their prices on Jan. 1. As Joshua Mahony, Chief Market Analyst at Scope Group, stated in a note shared with CCN, "With BABA up 42% over the past month, the 8% decline for Nvidia over that period highlights where the action is for tech traders right now." AI Adoption Boosts Chinese Firms While still significantly behind the U.S. in terms of investment, China's AI boom has catalyzed surging adoption across the country. Some of the country's largest corporations were among the first to embrace DeepSeek R1. That and an emerging roster of AI startups like Zhipu have fueled an influx of foreign investment, with major global funds directing capital to the Chinese market despite ongoing tariff concerns. Meanwhile, companies' spending on AI has gone from strength to strength. For its part, Alibaba has pledged to invest "at least" 380 billion yuan ($52.4 billion) in new cloud and AI infrastructure, the firm's single largest spending commitment ever.

Alibaba's New Model Adds Fuel to China's AI Race

On March 5, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released its latest AI reasoning model, QwQ-32B, resulting in an 8% spike in the company's Hong Kong-listed shares. While less capable than America's leading AI systems, such as OpenAI's o3 or Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the model reportedly performs about as well as its Chinese competitor DeepSeek's model, R1, while requiring considerably less computing power to develop and to run. Its creators say QwQ-32B embodies an "ancient philosophical spirit" by approaching problems with "genuine wonder and doubt." "It reflects the broader competitiveness of China's frontier AI ecosystem," says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That ecosystem includes DeepSeek's R1 and Tencent's Hunyuan model, which Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has said is by some measures "world-class." That said, assessments of Alibaba's latest model are preliminary, both due to the inherent challenge of measuring model capabilities, and because so far, the model has only been assessed by Alibaba itself. "The information environment is not very rich right now," says Singer. Since the release of DeepSeek's R1 model in January sent waves through the global stock market, China's tech ecosystem has been in the spotlight -- particularly as the U.S. increasingly sees itself as racing against China to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- highly advanced AI systems capable of performing most cognitive work, from graphic design to machine-learning research. AGI is widely expected to confer a decisive military and strategic advantage to whichever company or government creates it first, as such a system may be capable of engaging in advanced cyberwarfare or creating novel weapons of mass destruction (though experts are highly skeptical humans will be able to retain control over such a system, regardless of who creates it).

Alibaba shares jump on new open-source QwQ-32B reasoning model - SiliconANGLE

Shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. are up more than 8% today following the company's release of a reasoning model with performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1. The new model, QwQ-32B, was open-sourced on Wednesday. R1 comprises multiple neural networks that together have 671 billion parameters. When the model receives a query, it uses just one of the neural networks to generate an answer. In practice, that means R-1 activates only 37 billion of its 671 billion parameters at any given time. Alibaba's new QwQ-32B model is considerably smaller: the company says the algorithm has 32.5 billion parameters in total. QwQ-32B is based on the Transformer architecture that underpins most large language models. Transformer-based LLMs use a machine learning technique called attention to infer the meaning of sentences. Using attention, a neural network can not only consider multiple data points while making a decision also prioritize the most important ones. For QwQ-32B, Alibaba made several modifications to the original Transformer architecture. One of the main additions is a feature called rotary positional encoding. The capability allows the LLM to more thoroughly understand relationships between the text snippets it ingest, which helps boost output quality. QwQ-32B can process prompts with up to tokens with up to 131,072 tokens. One token corresponds to a few characters. Alibaba says that the model is particularly adept at reasoning tasks such as writing code, solving math problems and performing tasks in external applications. The company developed QwQ-32B using a method called reinforcement learning. In a reinforcement learning project, researchers give an AI model a set of training tasks and entrust a second AI model with checking the answers. When the LLM being trained completes a task correctly, it receives points that help guide the learning process. Alibaba developed QwQ-32B through two training sessions. The first session focused on teaching the model math and coding skills. To support the learning process, Alibaba set up a server that ran the code QwQ-32B produced during training and checked it for errors. During the second training session, the company honed QwQ-32B's general problem-solving capabilities. The second session followed a relatively simple workflow. Nevertheless, it not only improved the model's problem-solving skills but also enhanced its ability to align output with user instructions. According to Alibaba, QwQ-32B outperformed R1 across three of the five benchmarks it used to compare the LLMs. The former model achieved the biggest point difference, a 6% edge, in a benchmark that measures LLMs' ability to interact with external systems. The two other tests that Alibaba used evaluate LLMs' question-answering skills and ability to align output with user introductions. The release of QwQ-32B comes days after Alibaba committed to spending 380 billion yuan, or about $53 billion, on AI infrastructure in the next three years. That's more than what the company invested in AI and its public cloud platform over the past decade. Other Chinese tech giants are also prioritizing LLM development. Last week, Tencent Holdings Ltd. introduced a "fast-thinking" reasoning model dubbed Hunyuan Turbo S. It answers prompts in under a second and has comparable output quality to DeepSeek-V3, a predecessor of R1.

Alibaba's Latest AI Model Beats OpenAI's o1-mini, On Par With DeepSeek R1 - Decrypt

Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a new reasoning-focused AI model that manages to match the performance of much larger competitors despite being a fraction of their size. The cloud computing division of the Chinese tech giant's latest offering challenges the notion that bigger is always better in the AI world. Dubbed QwQ-32B, the model is built on Alibaba's Qwen2.5-32B foundation and uses 32.5 billion parameters while delivering comparable performance to DeepSeek r1, which houses a massive 671 billion parameters. The David versus Goliath achievement has caught the attention of AI researchers and developers globally. "This remarkable outcome underscores the effectiveness of RL when applied to robust foundation models pretrained on extensive world knowledge," Alibaba's Qwen team stated in their announcement blog post today. QwQ-32B, according to the company, particularly shines in mathematical reasoning and coding tasks. "We find that RL training can continuously improve the performance, especially in math and coding, and we observe that the continuous scaling of RL can help a medium-size model achieve competitive performance against gigantic MoE model," Alibaba wrote in their announcement tweet. It scored 65.2% on GPQA (a graduate-level scientific reasoning test), 50% on AIME (advanced mathematics), and an impressive 90.6% on MATH-500, which covers a wide range of mathematical problems, according to internal benchmark results. The AI community has responded with enthusiasm. "Absolutely love it!," noted Vaibhav Srivastav, a data scientist and AI researcher, whereas Julien Chaumond, CTO at Huggin Face said the model "changes everything." Also, Ollama and Groq announced that they implemented support for the model, meaning users can now program open source agents and use this model on third-party apps as well as achieving record-breaking inference speeds with Groq's infrastructure. This efficiency gain marks a potential shift in the industry, where the trend has been toward ever-larger models. QwQ-32B instead takes a similar approach to DeepSeek R1, showing that clever training techniques might be just as important as raw parameter count when it comes to AI performance. QwQ-32B does have limitations. It sometimes struggles with language mixing and can fall into recursive reasoning loops that affect its efficiency. Additionally, like other Chinese AI models, it complies with local regulatory requirements that may restrict responses on politically sensitive topics and has a somewhat limited 32K token context window. Unlike many advanced AI systems -- especially from America and Western countries -- that operate behind paywalls, QwQ-32B is available as open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license. The release follows Alibaba's January launch of Qwen 2.5-Max, which the company claimed outperformed competitors "almost across the board." That earlier release came during Lunar New Year celebrations, highlighting the competitive pressure Chinese tech companies face in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. The influence of Chinese models in the state of the AI industry is such that in a previous statement about this topic, President Donald Trump described their performance as a "wake-up call" to Silicon Valley, but viewed them as "an opportunity rather than a threat." When DeepSeek R1 was released, it triggered a significant decline in the stock market, but QwQ-32B has not affected investors in the same way. The Nasdaq is down overall, primarily for political reasons rather than a FUD attributed to Alibaba's influence. Still, Alibaba sees this release as just the beginning. "This marks Qwen's initial step in scaling Reinforcement Learning to enhance reasoning capabilities," the company stated in their blog post. "We are confident that combining stronger foundation models with RL powered by scaled computational resources will propel us closer to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)."

Alibaba shares soar 74% in 2025 amid the latest AI bet, DeepSeek rivalry. China stocks turning a corner?

Alibaba Group's Hong Kong-listed shares have soared 74% in 2025, driven by a combination of strong earnings, renewed government support, and a surging artificial intelligence (AI) race led by China's own DeepSeek. The latest boost came on Thursday, when Alibaba's stock jumped 8.4% after unveiling its QwQ-32B AI reasoning model -- its strongest push yet into the AI space. The model, designed to be more efficient while competing with DeepSeek's powerful R1, signaled Alibaba's intent to take on the fast-rising AI startup that has disrupted the global tech landscape since January. Market participants reacted swiftly, sending China's tech sector into a rally on Thursday, with the Hang Seng Tech Index jumping 5.4%. Alibaba's stock hit its highest level since late 2021. Alibaba's resurgence comes even as its market capitalization remains far below its peak. The company was once valued at $837.84 billion in October 2020 but has since tumbled, bottoming out at $203.66 billion in January, according to Companies Market Cap data. However, it has rebounded sharply in 2025, climbing to $344.31 billion as of March 7, mirroring a broader recovery in Chinese equities. After years of sell-offs, Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index has emerged as the world's best-performing major stock market this year, rising 20% so far. On Thursday, it surged to its highest level since January 2022, driven by investor enthusiasm over AI and Beijing's latest pledge to support emerging industries, including artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, and next-generation telecom. There has been a stark turnaround for Chinese stocks as well, which ended a three-year losing streak in 2024. The CSI 300 Index, which tracks China's biggest companies, gained 14.7% last year, while the Shanghai Composite rose 12.8%. Meanwhile, the Hang Seng ended 2024 with a 17.7% annual gain, its first positive year after four consecutive losses. Alibaba's stock rally has been further supported by stronger-than-expected earnings. In February, the company reported an 8% revenue increase for the three months ending in December, beating forecasts with 280 billion yuan in sales. The news triggered a 14% surge in its shares, reinforcing investor confidence in the company's post-crackdown recovery. Meanwhile, signs of a shift in Beijing's stance on big tech have also boosted sentiment. At a rare meeting in February, President Xi Jinping hailed the private sector and called China's economic challenges "surmountable" -- a move widely seen as a signal that the government may be easing its grip on tech firms after years of regulatory pressure. Adding to the intrigue, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, who had largely withdrawn from public view following the Ant Group IPO debacle in 2020, was present at the meeting. His inclusion has fueled speculation that Beijing's approach to tech giants may be softening. Meanwhile, DeepSeek's emergence as a low-cost AI alternative to US tech giants has added another layer of momentum to China's tech rally. Its open-source AI model, launched in January, shook up the industry, sparking investor enthusiasm for software-driven AI plays while denting sentiment for semiconductor stocks. Alibaba's response to the AI boom has been swift. The company has committed 380 billion yuan ($52 billion) over the next three years to AI infrastructure, a move that aligns with Beijing's ambitions of cementing China's status as a global AI leader. However, the broader economic picture remains murky. China is still grappling with sluggish consumer demand and a struggling property sector, while US-China lingering trade tensions continue to cast uncertainty. Still, with DeepSeek redefining the AI landscape, Alibaba's renewed push into the sector, and an improving regulatory environment, the conditions for a sustained tech rally are falling into place. The emergence of Alibaba, DeepSeek and other Chinese AI firms is reshaping investor sentiment worldwide. Last year, US semiconductor companies were the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom, but in 2025, they'll struggle amid concerns over shrinking margins and escalating US-China trade tensions. The question now is: Can China's tech bulls sustain this momentum, or will lingering economic and policy uncertainties keep investors on edge? Also read | 5 Wall Street moguls who dismissed Bitcoin as a fad -- Guess what they're saying now! (Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of the Economic Times)

How DeepSeek shook America's tech giants in weeks -- what others couldn't do in decades

Chinese technology giants are outpacing their US rivals, driven by the rapid advancements of DeepSeek, which has bolstered confidence in China's AI capabilities. DeepSeek's breakthroughs have accelerated investment in China's top technology firms, helping them gain an edge over American tech giants. A portfolio of China's top seven technology firms, labeled the '7 Titans' by Societe Generale SA, has gained over 40% in 2025. The combined market value of these companies, which include Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, Xiaomi, BYD Co, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, JD.com Inc, and NetEase Inc, has increased by $439 billion. Meanwhile, the US 'Magnificent Seven' stocks -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla -- have fallen by about 10% since the start of the year. This downturn has pushed the Nasdaq 100 Index close to a correction. The decline has been more pronounced in recent weeks, coinciding with DeepSeek's impact on US markets. Unlike leading AI startups in the US, which are valued in the tens of billions and backed by major investors like Microsoft and Amazon, DeepSeek operates with no external investors beyond its founder, Liang, and his cofounders. Chinese corporate records indicate that Liang owns about 84% of the Hangzhou-based company, which he founded in 2023 using funds from High-Flyer Capital Management, a hedge fund he cofounded in 2015. Despite limited revenue, analysts estimate DeepSeek's valuation at over $1 billion, with its only paid product being developer access to its models at significantly lower prices than OpenAI. At the beginning of the year, US stocks reached record highs, while Chinese equities struggled due to regulatory challenges and slow consumer recovery. However, DeepSeek's emergence changed market expectations, demonstrating that China's artificial intelligence sector was catching up faster than anticipated. Several factors are contributing to the rise of China's tech stocks. As Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privee, told Bloomberg, "The ingredients for China tech to shine are in place: Robust government backing, rebounding profits, and AI as a long-term growth engine." He added that while US technology stocks have seen valuation surges over the past two years, they are now facing setbacks due to disappointing earnings and economic pressures, leading investors to shift capital toward Europe and China. Strengthen China's PositionChina's technology sector gained additional momentum this week following Beijing's announcement of new support measures and fresh AI advancements from companies like Alibaba. Bloomberg reported that the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, which includes most of Societe Generale's highlighted stocks, surged over 6% this week, reaching its highest level since late 2021. Despite the sharp increase, Societe Generale analysts, led by Frank Benzimra, argue that China's '7 Titans' remain attractively valued. A February 28 report from the firm noted that the group trades at 18 times forward earnings, making them over 40% cheaper than the US 'Magnificent Seven' stocks.