Shares of Alibaba Group (HK:9988) climbed on Monday following the unveiling of Qwen 3.8-MAX, the company s latest flagship artificial intelligence model as domestic competition heats up in the race for advanced generative AI capabilities.
By 02:58 GMT, Alibaba s Hong Kong-listed stock had risen about 6% to HK$124.00. The company said Qwen 3.8-MAX delivers enhancements across multiple dimensions of model performance, including reasoning, coding, agent functionality and multimodal understanding, while also offering lower inference costs than earlier versions.
Built on the Qwen 3.5 architecture, the new Max-class model contains 2.4 trillion parameters with 95 billion active parameters. Alibaba said it will make Qwen 3.8-MAX the first Max-class Qwen model whose weights are released as open source next week, marking a notable shift in access to its largest model weights.
According to the company, benchmark testing showed Qwen 3.8-MAX to be broadly competitive with leading U.S. AI systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. Alibaba stated the model outperformed those peers on several coding, multimodal and engineering benchmarks, while it lagged on certain general-purpose reasoning evaluations.
The launch arrives as Alibaba steps up spending on AI infrastructure and cloud services to contend with domestic rivals including DeepSeek, Baidu and Tencent, and to press on against prominent U.S. models. Earlier in May, Alibaba said it would exceed its planned AI investment of up to 380 billion yuan ($55.96 billion) over the next three years.
Context and competitive dynamics
The rollout follows a period of rapid model upgrades across Chinese AI companies. Alibaba highlighted that competition accelerated after DeepSeek s introduction of low-cost reasoning models, which reshaped the competitive landscape earlier this year.
Alibaba emphasized lower inference costs for Qwen 3.8-MAX compared with prior iterations, and pointed to benchmark advantages in coding, multimodal and engineering tasks versus some leading U.S. models, balanced by weaker outcomes on some general-purpose reasoning tests.
Bottom line
Qwen 3.8-MAX represents a significant technical update by Alibaba, accompanied by a public release of model weights and an asserted improvement in cost efficiency for inference. The announcement coincided with a marked positive move in Alibaba s Hong Kong-listed shares and underscores intensifying competition among major AI developers in China and abroad.