Alibaba Share Price Climbs 7 Per Cent As Chinese Giant Launches DeepSeek Contender QwQ-32B Model

Alibaba' share price jumped 7 per cent after launching the latest DeepSeek contender Alibaba’s shares climbed up to 7.4 per cent in Hong Kong. Alibaba, a top Chinese e-commerce giant, in 2025 became a major contender in China's artificial intelligence (AI) industry by launching its QwQ-32B model, which surpasses the previous version with only 5 per cent of the parameters used by DeepSeek’s R1 model, as per a report by Bloomberg.

As of now, the Chinese conglomerate has witnessed a strong recovery, adding $135 billion to its market capitalisation this year, showing signs of recovery from a long Chinese government crackdown.

“There are 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, as quoted by Economic Times. “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.”

Meanwhile, China’s technology sector received another boost this week after China announced that it would give support to the wide application of large-scale AI models and aggressively work on developing a new generation of intelligent terminals and smart manufacturing tools. As per the Bloomberg report, Analysts have been favouring an optimistic message from the National People’s Congress meeting this week in Beijing, where technological upheaval and utilisation have been supported by officials as the top priority.

Additionally, Alibaba has committed to invest over 380 billion yuan (Rs 4.57 lakh crore) in AI infrastructure including data centres in the next three years. This was seen as a major pledge that underscores the e-commerce pioneer’s ambitions of becoming a leader in artificial intelligence, the report added.

Alibaba's revenue stood at 280.15 billion yuan (Rs 3.36 lakh crore) for the three-month quarter that ended on December 31, 2024, compared with 279.34 billion yuan (Rs 3.35 lakh crore) expected by 17 analysts polled by LSEG.

Earlier this year, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu announced Alibaba’s aggressive stance towards investing in AI. He said in an official statement that the AI era represents a simple and huge demand for infrastructure. “We will aggressively invest in AI infrastructure,” Wu announced during earnings calls. He also talked about investment in the pipeline for cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years. This is expected to exceed what they have spent over the past decade, he added.