$BABA-W(09988)$ On August 25, according to Hong Kong Stock Exchange filings, Alibaba Group (09988) Chairman Joe Tsai added to his position, buying 720,000 shares of Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed stock at an average price of around HK$113.47 per share. Total consideration came to roughly HK$82 million.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Qwen's latest release is a real shift, especially the smaller models that can be fine-tuned. Running them in-house costs about 10x less, and they hold up well against Anthropic's models. With fine-tuning for specific use cases, they can even pull ahead. I don't really see the case for paying per-token rates at Anthropic or OpenAI when an open-source model that's transparent and far cheaper is available. Running everything in a closed loop in-house also gives you a better security posture.
$BABA-W(09988)$ BABA has been getting a lot of negative press from Barron's, but that might actually make this a good entry point. The cloud computing revenue growth is hard to ignore, and advertising feels like more of a legacy drag at this point.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Total CapEx by U.S. hyperscalers is around $720 bln, while Chinese hyperscalers are at roughly $120 bln. Chinese AI models are still behind U.S. ones, but the gap is closing. Given how the Chinese market works, they won't use U.S. AI models, only domestic ones — that's a national policy. So BABA will keep scaling and benefiting from the huge Chinese market. It's not a "winner takes it all" race.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Interesting reading some of the comments here. People seem to view American companies investing heavily in AI as wise and forward-looking, but when BABA or other Chinese companies do the same, it's suddenly seen as stupid and the stocks as trash. I like patriotism as much as anyone, but investing based on nationalism rather than fundamentals is a very silly approach. Many American AI stocks look extremely expensive by almost any conventional valuation measure, while many Chinese companies, and certainly BABA, appear significantly undervalued. Whatever the rock star of short investing has to say.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Alibaba is testing whether AI agents can run an e-commerce business over a full year. They have introduced MerchantBench, a benchmark that simulates 365 days of operations using over 98,000 real-world product records and 26 tools. The setup evaluates how agents handle pricing, inventory, cash flow, and other business decisions.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Alibaba Cloud is the only domestic cloud provider that has economies of scale, in-house chip development, and a first-tier self-developed large language model all at once. That combination makes its near-to-medium-term financial performance likely to beat market expectations, especially given its position as China's largest cloud vendor.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Hong Kong data centre wholesale pricing for hyperscalers reportedly jumped 90% from the start of 2026, driven by the Chinese AI boom. That kind of move in such a short window is pretty striking.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Alibaba just rolled out Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion parameter AI model. The pricing is noticeably lower than what OpenAI and Anthropic charge — $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.