Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s inventory leapt greater than 19% after reporting a surge in income from AI, underscoring the regular headway it’s making towards rivals in a post-DeepSeek Chinese language growth frenzy.
China’s e-commerce chief posted a triple-digit proportion acquire in AI-related product income in addition to a better-than-anticipated 26% leap in gross sales from the cloud division—the enterprise most carefully tied to the synthetic intelligence increase.
That helped assuage traders nervous concerning the fallout from a worsening battle with Meituan and JD.com Inc. in web commerce. Alibaba’s shares gained their most intraday since November 2022 in Hong Kong, boosting the corporate’s market worth by greater than $50 billion. Turnover within the inventory marked a report excessive as of early afternoon. The rally helped energize the broader AI sphere: Ernie-developer Baidu Inc. gained as a lot as 5.8%, whereas Tencent Holdings Ltd. additionally climbed.
“Alibaba’s earnings underscore a bifurcation within China tech: AI is delivering scalable growth, while traditional consumer-facing segments remain mired in destructive price competition,” mentioned Charu Chanana, chief funding strategist at Saxo Markets.
“The triple-digit surge in AI revenue and robust cloud sales show Alibaba is repositioning for longer-term relevance in the tech stack, not just retail dominance,” she added.
Alibaba’s progress in AI—the place it’s thought-about among the many front-runners in Chinese language synthetic intelligence growth—helped gloss over issues concerning the three-way battle gripping on-line commerce.
That dealt extra harm than anticipated to a number of the nation’s e-commerce leaders: JD’s revenue halved within the quarter whereas Meituan warned of main losses, triggering a $27 billion selloff of the three firms’ shares final week.
The AI factor helps clarify why Alibaba’s inventory has simply outpaced its extra commerce-reliant rivals this yr. Alibaba has additionally leveraged the expansion of a global arm that encompasses a number of the world’s most-recognized on-line purchasing platforms from Lazada to AliExpress.
It has “China’s best AI enabler thesis,” Morgan Stanley analysts together with Gary Yu wrote in a analysis observe. That’s as losses from meal supply and immediate commerce peak this quarter, they mentioned.
Buyers at the moment are centered on whether or not Alibaba will pursue that margin-eroding competitors, at a time it’s declared report quantities of spending towards creating AI providers and computing.
On Friday, commerce chief Jiang Fan argued that investments in fast commerce—meals supply and immediate purchasing—had already pushed 20% development in customers on its important Taobao market. The fledgling division has in 4 months grown to the purpose that it might probably start to attain economies of scale, he added.
Alibaba is concurrently making substantial investments within the AI area, creating giant language fashions to keep away from falling behind in a important technological race.
The corporate views AI as important to its future, whether or not when it comes to offering cloud computing, powering its core enterprise or developing with providers to problem OpenAI and DeepSeek. CEO Eddie Wu went so far as saying in February that synthetic basic intelligence, or AGI, is now the corporate’s major goal.
Simply final week, Alibaba up to date its personal open-source video producing mannequin, a part of a string of latest upgrades that span the gamut from agentic AI providers to chatbots.
It stays to be seen if Alibaba can flip AI right into a money-spinner in an more and more aggressive area. From Baidu to Tencent, Chinese language corporations are enhancing and releasing AI fashions at a frenetic tempo, rising the stress on Alibaba to ship breakthroughs.
“Alibaba’s breakout reinforces a broader theme in Asia: while global tech remains preoccupied with geopolitics and valuations, parts of China tech are quietly reaccelerating—driven not by hype, but by real revenue growth in AI and cloud,” Chanana mentioned. “This isn’t a broad-based rotation yet—but the divergence is real.”
“Alibaba’s breakout reinforces a broader theme in Asia: while global tech remains preoccupied with geopolitics and valuations, parts of China tech are quietly reaccelerating—driven not by hype, but by real revenue growth in AI and cloud,” Chanana mentioned. “This isn’t a broad-based rotation yet—but the divergence is real.”
