Shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA, Financials) soared almost 7% in Hong Kong after the Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing corporation announced Qwen3.8-Max, its new flagship artificial intelligence model.
The model is on par with leading worldwide artificial intelligence systems and outperforms Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 on several internal benchmarks, Alibaba added.
Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model, is built for autonomous coding and difficult jobs demanding long-running execution. In one internal test, the business said, the model completed a full software engineering project on its own in 16 days.
Alibaba said it would open-source the model weights for public download next week. Wider availability could encourage developers to embrace the Qwen ecosystem and even increase demand for Alibaba's cloud infrastructure.
The announcement comes as the company ramps up expenditure on AI and cloud computing while competing with DeepSeek, Baidu and Tencent in China. Alibaba is also pitting its Qwen model against those from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The stock's reaction indicates investors view Alibaba's AI development as a possible catalyst for cloud expansion and a means to close the value gap with U.S. technology businesses.
Investors will next be looking at the public model release and whether Qwen adoption begins translating to faster cloud revenue growth.