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Alibaba Group’s shares in Hong Kong surged to nearly a four-year high after the company announced its latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. The CEO highlighted that AI models are expected to become the next-generation operating systems, transforming the tech landscape.
The stock closed 9.2% higher at HKD174.00 ($22.38) per share today, marking more than a doubling in value this year. Meanwhile, its U.S.-listed shares decreased slightly by 0.7%, ending yesterday at $163.08.
During the Apsara Conference, an annual tech event in Hangzhou dedicated to developers, Alibaba introduced Qwen3-Max—its largest large language model to date with over one trillion parameters—alongside other members of the Qwen3 family that support visual and multimodal processing.
Additionally, the company launched Fun, a suite of speech large language models equipped with advanced multilingual speech recognition and synthesis features. It also unveiled Lingyang AgentOne, a comprehensive enterprise AI platform designed to help organizations transition from reactive responses to proactive intelligence.
The CEO stated that in the future, extensive AI models will become deeply integrated into a variety of devices, functioning like operating systems. These models will possess persistent memory, facilitate seamless cloud and edge coordination, and continue to evolve. “We are dedicated to open-sourcing Qwen and developing it into the ‘OS of the AI era,’ empowering developers worldwide to create transformative AI applications,” he said.
Since introducing Qwen’s first version in 2023, the company has open-sourced over 300 AI models, which have been downloaded more than 600 million times and spawned over 170,000 derivative models. More than one million businesses and individuals have utilized Qwen through Alibaba’s AI development platform, Model Studio.
The CEO predicted that AI’s adoption rate will surpass that of all past technologies, with models operating across all computing devices and users engaging with AI tools in everyday tasks. He even suggested that natural language could emerge as the primary programming language of this era.
The industry is expected to shift focus from central processing units to graphics processing units, driven by AI demands, requiring vast infrastructure and full-stack technological solutions. He estimated that only five or six global super cloud computing platforms might dominate this landscape.
To realize this vision, Alibaba is committed to investing CNY380 billion ($53.3 billion) in AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years, aiming to accelerate the arrival of the super AI epoch through substantial investment.
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