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Alibaba Group (HK:9988) shares climbed sharply on Monday after the company introduced Qwen 3.8-MAX, the newest version of its flagship artificial intelligence model, highlighting its growing ambitions in the rapidly evolving AI market. The announcement boosted investor sentiment, sending Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares up 6% to HK$124.00 during trading.
The company said Qwen 3.8-MAX delivers major improvements across reasoning, coding, AI agent capabilities, and multimodal understanding while reducing inference costs compared with earlier versions. These enhancements are designed to make the model more efficient and competitive as businesses increasingly adopt generative AI technologies.
Built on Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 architecture, the latest model features 2.4 trillion parameters, including 95 billion active parameters. Alibaba also confirmed that Qwen 3.8-MAX will become the first Max-class Qwen model to have its weights released as open source next week, expanding access for developers and researchers worldwide.
According to Alibaba, benchmark testing shows the model performs competitively against leading AI systems developed by OpenAI and Anthropic. The company said Qwen 3.8-MAX outperformed several U.S. rivals in coding, engineering, and multimodal benchmarks, although it still trails some competitors in broader reasoning tasks.
The launch reflects Alibaba's continued push to strengthen its artificial intelligence and cloud computing businesses as competition intensifies among Chinese technology companies. Domestic rivals such as DeepSeek, Baidu, and Tencent have accelerated AI model development, while Chinese firms also seek to narrow the gap with leading U.S. AI providers.
Earlier this year, Alibaba announced it would invest more than its previously planned 380 billion yuan (approximately $55.96 billion) in AI infrastructure and cloud computing over the next three years, underscoring the strategic importance of AI to the company's long-term growth.
The release of Qwen 3.8-MAX follows a wave of rapid AI model upgrades across China after DeepSeek's low-cost reasoning models reshaped the competitive landscape. As the global AI race accelerates, Alibaba's latest model positions the company to compete more aggressively in both domestic and international artificial intelligence markets.
