BABA was up 8.61% in New York Trade March 5.
From Bloomberg, March 5:
March 5, 2025 at 6:56 PM PST
Updated on March 5, 2025 at 9:28 PM PST
- The platform marked a big leap over the previous version
- Alibaba is now at the forefront of the domestic AI sector
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’s stock gained as much as 7.6% in Hong Kong, the most intraday in nearly two weeks, helping propel a gauge of Chinese tech shares almost 5% higher. The tech company has gone on a tear this year, gaining some $135 billion of market value. Investors have warmed to the company founded by Jack Ma as it stabilizes a business sideswiped by a years-long government crackdown. Its growing prowess in AI and mounting signs of Beijing’s support helped galvanize its comeback.
“There’s quite a few positive drivers for Alibaba with their open-source reasoning model the latest catalyst,” said Vey-Sern Ling, a managing director at Union Bancaire Privee. “Their core business is improving and clearly will benefit from China’s push to drive consumption. Investors now also recognize the value that AI will bring to their cloud computing business.”
The sector got another boost this week after China said it would support the extensive application of large-scale AI models and development of new-generation intelligent terminals and manufacturing equipment. Analysts have been favorable to positive messaging coming from the National People’s Congress meeting this week in Beijing, where technological innovation and consumption have been touted by officials as top priorities.
In the wake of DeepSeek’s emergence this year, multiple companies have trotted out models and services they claim match the Chinese startup’s or OpenAI, whose ChatGPT is credited with igniting the generative AI boom.
The litany of rollouts has captivated both investors and the Chinese public. This week, Manus AI launched what it called a general AI agent, or a bot that can perform tasks. The company said its model is performing better than OpenAI’s DeepResearch on at least some fronts using the GAIA benchmark, designed for assessing an AI model’s ability to handle real-world scenarios....
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