# Alibaba
Latest news and articles about Alibaba
Total: 53 articles found
China’s ¥100bn Lunar New Year ‘Red‑Packet’ War Exposes an Emerging AI Compute Crunch
China’s Spring Festival promotional campaigns—collectively worth nearly ¥100 billion—have driven extreme traffic spikes that briefly knocked services offline and highlighted a growing mismatch between consumer‑facing AI adoption and available compute capacity. Firms are ramping cloud and data‑centre investments even as advances in models and token windows multiply inference demand, creating cross‑cutting pressures on energy systems and commodity supply chains.
Hang Seng Falters as Big Internet Names Slip, While Chips and AI Model Stocks Rally
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 0.86% with major internet platforms declining as investors grew cautious on consumer‑facing tech. At the same time, semiconductor suppliers and AI model companies jumped sharply, reflecting a thematic shift toward hardware and generative‑AI plays.
China’s Tech Giants Turn Spring Festival into an AI‑Fuelled Red‑Envelope Arms Race
China’s leading tech platforms have launched an extraordinary Lunar New Year promotional battle that blends cash red packets, steep discounts and AI features, with announced spends approaching 10 billion yuan (~$1.4bn). The campaigns aim not only to drive immediate consumption but to train users on AI interactions and lock them into each firm’s ecosystem.
Hong Kong Stocks Tick Up on Metals Rally as Tech Pauses
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose modestly as metals and rare‑earth related stocks led gains, while some optical‑communications and large internet names drifted lower. The moves reflect investor interest in commodity and battery supply chains amid broader geopolitical and industrial concerns about raw‑material security.
Joseph Tsai Says Jack Ma Once 'Fired' Him — and Signals Alibaba's New, Narrower Focus on AI and Cloud
At a Stanford Business School interview, Alibaba chairman Joseph Tsai revealed Jack Ma once removed him from an operations role early in Alibaba's history and described the company's renewed strategic focus: concentrate on e-commerce, expand AI and cloud (with an eye toward GPU demand), and deprioritize non-core assets. He framed these choices as pragmatic responses to market realities and the need for clear priorities.
China’s AI “Red‑Envelope” War: Alibaba’s Qianwen Rockets to 58m Daily Users — But Will They Stay?
Alibaba’s Qianwen vaulted to 58.48 million daily users on day one of its Spring Festival cash giveaway, narrowing the gap with ByteDance’s Doubao and eclipseing Tencent’s Yuanbao. The spike underscores how massive subsidies can reconfigure app rankings quickly, but low retention figures suggest the gains may be fleeting unless platform AI capabilities and habit formation improve.
China’s New Year Becomes AI’s Debut Season: Giants Gamble Billions and Workers Guard the Servers
China’s tech giants turned the Spring Festival into a high-stakes field test for generative AI, deploying billions in marketing and integrations while backend engineers worked through the holiday to prevent compute-driven outages. The event may mark a pivot from model-building to mass application, accelerating consolidation and everyday use of AI across social, local and entertainment services.
Regulators Target Gaode’s Ride‑hailing Aggregator — China’s on‑demand transport market faces a reset
Chinese regulators summoned Gaode Dache on 9 February 2026, criticising partner management, fare suppression and emergency response. The confrontation exposes structural weaknesses of the aggregation model and signals a regulatory pivot toward pre‑emptive ecosystem governance that will raise costs and reshape ride‑hailing economics.
Alibaba’s Taobao Flash Sale Pulls Back on Subsidies — The 2026 Food-Delivery Fight Turns Toward Profits
Taobao Flash Sale has quietly increased commissions and reshaped coupon rules for merchants, signalling a shift from subsidy-driven growth to monetisation. The changes reflect both platform-level unit-economics pressure and Alibaba’s need to reallocate capital toward costly AI infrastructure, and they could reshape merchant economics and consumer pricing over time.
Alibaba Turns Free Milk Tea into a Showcase for Full‑Stack AI Power
Alibaba used a RMB3 billion promotion through its Qianwen app to orchestrate 10 million milk‑tea orders in nine hours, demonstrating the company’s full‑stack AI capability. By combining in‑house models, cloud infrastructure and proprietary silicon with deep integration across its consumer ecosystem, Alibaba showcased a path from generative models to agentic, real‑world execution.
Alibaba’s Qwen3.5 Appears in Hugging Face Transformers — A Quiet Move That Could Amplify China’s AI Reach
A pull request adding Qwen3.5 to the Hugging Face Transformers repository surfaced on February 9, signaling Alibaba’s latest model is being integrated into the world’s primary open‑source AI toolkit. Whether the change includes usable weights or only interface support, the move lowers barriers for developers, broadens the model’s reach, and raises questions about licensing, safety and geopolitics.
Alibaba’s Qianwen Extends Lunar New Year Free-Order Cards as Demand Overwhelms Delivery Capacity
Alibaba’s Qianwen extended its Spring Festival 25-yuan free-order card validity to February 28 after demand outpaced expectations, and widened eligibility to include meals, fresh produce and New Year goods via Tmall and Hema. Heavy user participation has strained merchant and flash-delivery capacity, leaving many unable to place orders and exposing the logistics limits behind a high-profile promotional push.