Alibaba Leads Chinese AI Race with Qwen3 Model and Aggressive Pricing Strategy

Alibaba, Chinese Tech Firms Slash AI Model Prices To Win Developers - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA)

Alibaba Group BABA stock is trading lower on Friday amid reports indicating the e-commerce juggernaut and other major Chinese tech firms have slashed the prices of AI coding models to roughly one-fifth of what leading international rivals charge. The companies aim to trade short-term profits for long-term developer loyalty and market dominance, YiCai reported on Friday, citing industry experts. On July 23, Alibaba Cloud launched its Qwen3-Coder model and immediately offered a 50% discount. Earlier, Moonshot AI's July 11 release of the Kimi K2 model, known for its coding and agent capabilities, helped drive Chinese pricing down to about 4 Chinese yuan ($0.55) per million input tokens and 16 Chinese yuan ($2.23) for output, roughly 20% of the cost of Anthropic's Claude 4. Also Read: Alibaba, Huawei Dominate China's Growing Cloud Market Chinese firms are strategically using price cuts to rapidly attract developers, encourage product adoption, build usage habits, and collect user feedback to refine their offerings, YiCai cited Charlie Dai, VP and chief analyst at Forrester. Trending Investment OpportunitiesAdvertisementArrivedBuy shares of homes and vacation rentals for as little as $100. Get StartedWiserAdvisorGet matched with a trusted, local financial advisor for free.Get StartedPoint.comTap into your home's equity to consolidate debt or fund a renovation.Get StartedRobinhoodMove your 401k to Robinhood and get a 3% match on deposits.Get Started Chen Xin, who oversees Alibaba Cloud's coding tool Tongyi Lingma, said current paid-user penetration stands at 10-20%, with typical efficiency gains of 10-30%. However, he expects that to rise to 50-60% within six months and potentially reach 80% in a year as both domestic and global models mature. Alibaba stock has gained 43% year-to-date, topping the NYSE Composite Index's (of which Alibaba is also a constituent) over 9% returns. Price Action: BABA shares are trading lower by 1.05% to $119.88 premarket at last check Friday. Read Next: Autonomous Driving Player Mobileye Stock Drops Despite Raising Outlook, Margin Growth Photo by Poetra.RH via Shutterstock BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$119.72-1.18%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum90.98Growth94.63Quality46.02Value84.29Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewMarket News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Alibaba's Upgraded Qwen3 Outperforms OpenAI, DeepSeek - Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA)

Alibaba Group BABA launched an upgraded version of its third-generation Qwen3 family of large language models (LLMs), enhancing its AI capabilities in math and coding to outperform top models from OpenAI and DeepSeek in key benchmarks. The new open-source model, Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507-FP8, delivered marked improvements in instruction following, logical reasoning, coding, science, and tool usage, as noted in updates on HuggingFace and Alibaba's ModelScope platform, SCMP reported on Tuesday. While the upgraded Qwen model currently operates in a non-thinking mode, delivering direct outputs without displaying reasoning steps, it now supports inputs of up to 256,000 tokens. This represents an eightfold increase, enabling the model to process much longer text sequences within a single conversation. Also Read: Alibaba, Huawei Dominate China's Growing Cloud Market Beyond its core LLM advancements, Alibaba also announced that its 3-billion-parameter Qwen model will power HP's "Xiaowei Hui" smart assistant in China. This integration aims to help users more efficiently draft documents and summarize meetings. Performance data released by the company shows Qwen3-Coder surpassed domestic rivals such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's K2 in key coding benchmarks. Alibaba also said the model rivals top U.S. offerings, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude, in select capabilities. Trending Investment OpportunitiesAdvertisementArrivedBuy shares of homes and vacation rentals for as little as $100. Get StartedWiserAdvisorGet matched with a trusted, local financial advisor for free.Get StartedPoint.comTap into your home's equity to consolidate debt or fund a renovation.Get StartedRobinhoodMove your 401k to Robinhood and get a 3% match on deposits.Get Started During a recent visit to China, Nvidia NVDA CEO Jensen Huang praised the Qwen series, alongside DeepSeek and Moonshot's Kimi models, as among the world's most advanced open reasoning AI systems, underscoring China's rapid progress in the global AI race. Huang visited China shortly after the U.S. approved export license filings for the company's H20 GPUs, which were designed to meet American export regulations. Although U.S. agencies have not finalized the paperwork, Huang said the government assured Nvidia that licenses would be granted. Alibaba stock has seen substantial gains this year, increasing over 42% year-to-date and outperforming the NYSE Composite Index's rise of over 8%. Price Action: BABA shares were trading higher by 2.15% to $123.31 premarket at last check Wednesday. Read Next: Alibaba Bleeds Billions As Delivery Price War Erases $100 Billion In Market Value Photo by Mamun_Sheikh via Shutterstock BABAAlibaba Group Holding Ltd$123.182.05%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum91.02Growth94.54Quality45.30Value84.55Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewNVDANVIDIA Corp$168.300.76%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Alibaba Is China's Clear AI Leader (NYSE:BABA)

In this article I make the case that Alibaba's AI successes add to the case for buying its stock. Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE:BABA) is rapidly becoming one of the leaders in China's artificial intelligence race. With its well received Qwen language model (LLM) and rapidly growing cloud services segment, the company is perfectly positioned to capitalize on Financial journalist. Passed CFA Level 1. Seeking value and dividend growth opportunities, and sharing what I find on Seeking Alpha. Analyst's Disclosure:I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of BABA either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.