The Next Web reported that some Chinese outlets have listed the N1 at 2,899 yuan, below Alibaba’s official starting price of 2,999 yuan. Alibaba is pricing its glasses in line with Meta’s market-leading Ray-Ban range rather than trying to win buyers over with a lower price, in a strategy focused on features and quality instead of affordability. The glasses are now available to order in China through Taobao, Tmall, JD.com and Douyin.

Alibaba lists AI glasses at $450

The N1 carries a 50-megapixel sensor with a 1G5P lens and shoots 4K video. Wearers can use bone-conduction microphones to interact with Alibaba’s Qwen AI assistant via a voice chat feature, while the glasses also support translation, meeting notes, shopping and payments, which are all accessible through voice commands.

Yahoo Finance reports that the glasses can last up to 25 hours on standby or deliver nine hours of music playback per charge. Priced at 3,499 yuan, the N1 Pro uses eye-tracking technology to let users ask questions about objects they are looking at, without having to point them out or describe them.

The N1 Pro smart glasses also enable hands-free payments through Alipay, where users can start a transaction in the app and nod to confirm when they look at a merchant’s QR code and check the payment details.

The glasses also help to monitor health metrics such as heart rate, blood oxygen levels and skin temperature, and use AI to turn the readings into quality health summaries.

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Non-GAAP net income after removal of share-based pay, investment swings and one-off items still dropped 38% to 20.72 billion yuan ($3.05 billion), while adjusted EBITA fell 30% to 27.33 billion yuan ($4.03 billion). Alibaba’s capital expenditures for Q2 hit 67.68 billion yuan ($9.98 billion), a 75% jump from the same period a year earlier, money the company tied to AI infrastructure. The expenditure drained cash, as free cash flow swung to an outflow of 44.67 billion yuan ($6.58 billion), more than double the 18.82 billion yuan outflow a year earlier.

Alibaba records 75% rise in capital spending

The unit housing Alibaba’s model work, its Qwen consumer app and the QwenWork enterprise agent, its AI Labs and Applications segment, ran an adjusted EBITA loss of 13.86 billion yuan ($2.04 billion). This loss was only 3.22 billion yuan one year ago. Alibaba blamed the higher numbers on higher inference costs from the Qwen app and deeper investment in its AI stack. The AI Cloud and Compute Services segment lifted revenue by 45% to 48.44 billion yuan ($7.14 billion).

Alibaba credited this to an increased adoption of its AI products. Revenue from AI-related products specifically came in at 12.38 billion yuan ($1.82 billion), a 12th straight quarter of triple-digit growth over one year. Unlike the AI applications unit, cloud brought in significant revenue. Its adjusted EBITA rose 133% to 5.63 billion yuan ($830 million). “We delivered a strong quarter, driven by the improving commercialization of our full-stack AI capabilities,” Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said in a statement.

Alibaba’s retail engine split in two different directions, with the China Quick Commerce revenue climbing 45% to 53.30 billion yuan, while the larger China E-commerce business slipped 8% to 110.90 billion yuan. Its 88VIP membership tier grew by double digits to about 64 million members as of June 30.

Three months earlier, Alibaba posted adjusted net income of just 86 million yuan and its first operating loss since 2021, all caused by the same AI and quick-commerce bills. The company has told investors it aims to reach $100 billion in combined annual revenue from cloud and AI within five years. The scale of the spending in the just-completed quarter shows what this target will cost before it is achieved.

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The preview is now accessible on Alibaba’s Token Plan subscription service and through two of its agent-based developer tools, Qoder and QoderWork. What makes Qwen 3.8-Max powerful is its 2.4 trillion parameters. Parameters show how much complexity an AI system can handle. The larger the number, the better the performance. The announcement that came out at Shanghai’s biggest AI event, the World AI Conference, shows a major shift of Chinese developers towards a multi-trillion-parameter target.

Alibaba stock surges amid flagship AI model unveiling

The news pushed Alibaba’s stock for the second time this week. The Hong Kong-listed shares climbed as much as 5.4% on Monday, putting the company at the top of the Hang Seng Index for the day. Just a couple of days ago, its U.S.-listed shares also jumped about 5% in premarket trading. That surge happened after Chinese authorities approved Apple’s on-device AI for the Chinese market, as previously reported by Cryptopolitan.

The approval had been on hold for some time and links Apple’s iPhone to Alibaba’s Qwen AI for users across the world’s largest smartphone market. Another Beijing-based startup, Moonshot AI, also made headlines this week. On Thursday, the company launched Kimi K3, a model it says is now the biggest open-source AI system in the world, with 2.8 trillion parameters. This makes it outperform other Chinese competitors like DeepSeek’s V4 Pro, which stands at 1.6 trillion parameters, and Zhipu AI’s GLM 5 line at 744 billion.

Moonshot said Kimi K3 was purpose-built for tasks like extended coding projects, in-depth research, and complex reasoning. The company was upfront that K3 still falls short of the strongest closed-access models but said it beat out several well-known systems in benchmark tests, among them OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2. The developments for Alibaba come alongside some notable friction.

About a month ago, the Pentagon added Alibaba to its list of companies it considers tied to China’s military, placing it alongside automaker BYD and search company Baidu. Companies on the list are blocked from landing U.S. defense contracts. Defense officials said the move reflects concern about Beijing’s push to bring private sector strength into its military operations. All three companies rejected the designation. Alibaba said the inclusion had no grounds.

“Alibaba is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy,” the firm said in a statement. On top of that, Anthropic has accused Alibaba of improperly drawing from its Claude AI model, something the U.S. company called a “distillation” attack, where a less advanced model learns by training on outputs from a stronger one. Anthropic said it was the biggest incident of this type it had ever faced.

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According to an earlier Cryptopolitan report, the Pentagon released the update just as the two countries kept tightening controls on technology, data, energy, and manufacturing. The Ministry of Commerce of China announced on Saturday that America went beyond its limits in terms of national security concerns, as well as exerted governmental influence to pressure the business of China. The ministry demanded the withdrawal of such decisions. It also asked Washington to deal with Chinese companies in a fair manner and build a stable relationship with China.

China warns the US to cancel its categorization of Chinese platforms

China was direct in its latest warning, noting that, “Otherwise, China will take resolute and forceful countermeasures, and the consequences and responsibility arising therefrom will rest entirely with the US side.” The Chinese embassy in Washington rejected the blacklist. Spokesman Liu Pengyu said firms from China follow the laws of the countries where they operate. “The US should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just, and non-discriminatory environment,” Liu said.

The Pentagon list is known as the Section 1260H list. US law requires the Defense Department to update it yearly through 2030. A company can ask the Pentagon to review its case and submit evidence to challenge the label. Alibaba said there was “no basis” for adding the company, and that being named on the 1260H list does not just automatically ban exports or stop a company from serving American customers. The US Commerce Department runs a separate Entity List, and that list can block or limit access to American technology, Alibaba explained.

The 1260H list is one of several tools Washington uses as the US and China separate in sensitive sectors. On Saturday, Chinese regulators announced stricter rules for financial information services. The Cyberspace Administration of China said companies must sort data into four groups: core, important, sensitive general, and routine general. Officials said each category would depend on its value, sensitivity, and the damage a leak could cause. Six other agencies issued the rules, including the People’s Bank of China.

The rules are part of Beijing’s data security system. China passed broad laws before adding sector rules. “Financial information services are developing in an orderly manner, and the volume of data is expanding … which urgently requires standardised, classified and graded management,” the guidelines said. The new rules do not cover state secrets or military information. Meanwhile, as previously reported, Trump announced Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor.

Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, said the choices showed that Trump planned to put China at the center of his foreign policy. Before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk met separately with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng in Washington. Han attended as Xi Jinping’s special representative. His visit showed Beijing wanted working ties with the new US administration even as both sides added more pressure in trade, technology, security, and industry.

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It quickly rose to first place in rankings for creating videos from text descriptions and turning still images into moving clips. On Friday, the people behind HappyHorse set up a new account on X and said the project came from Alibaba’s ATH AI Innovation Unit. They added that work on the system continues. Alibaba confirmed the announcement after reposting from its main account.

Alibaba shares rise over AI video model ownership reveal

Alibaba’s shares in Hong Kong went up 2.12 percent on Friday after the news came out. Earlier in the week, on Wednesday, the stock had jumped 6.75 percent when technology shares broadly gained ground after tensions between the United States and Iran cooled down. Some market watchers had already been wondering if Alibaba was connected to the unnamed model.

The company has been working hard to grow its AI products as Chinese firms compete fiercely in this space. It already has the Qwen large language model and a chatbot application. While Alibaba released other AI systems before that could make videos, none created as much excitement or scored as well as HappyHorse did in just a few days. This new tool could make Alibaba stronger in video creation, especially since other companies have hit problems.

OpenAI recently shut down its Sora video app, saying it wanted to concentrate on coding tools, business customers, and general artificial intelligence work because computing costs were too high. The firm stepping back might help Chinese competitors, but ByteDance had to stop rolling out its popular Seedance 2.0 after Hollywood studios and streaming services accused it of copyright violations.

Alibaba’s chief executive, Eddie Wu, has made AI development the top goal for the company’s many different businesses, which also cover computer chip design and data centers. The company has already built its AI models into online shopping, advertising, and entertainment products, and might plan to do the same with HappyHorse. Alibaba’s earlier Wan video creator ranked only around 20th on Artificial Analysis, so HappyHorse reaching the top shows a big jump in Alibaba’s video AI abilities.

China is also pushing hard towards AI chip independence. As reported by Cryptopolitan on Tuesday, Alibaba and China Telecom said they are building a computing center in southern China using chips that Alibaba designed. The facility will have 10,000 Zhenwu semiconductors made for AI work that can run systems with hundreds of billions of parameters. China Telecom will own and run the location.

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According to Alibaba, the new chip is also more than three times faster than the older XuanTie C920. In the announcement blog post, Alibaba said RISC-V’s open standard lets chip designers customize instruction sets and speed up specific AI jobs with little or no licensing fees. “RISC-V’s open-standard nature allows chip designers to customize instruction sets and accelerate specific AI workloads with no or low licensing fees. This is particularly important for the development of AI agents,” said Alibaba.

Alibaba to push agentic AI tools with new chip

The new XuanTie C950 is part of a chip plan being pushed through T-Head, Alibaba’s chip arm, which is mainly focused on the Zhenwu 810E series for AI training and inference, while the XuanTie line is aimed at high-performance cloud systems and agentic AI. The launch came days after Alibaba rolled out Wukong, an enterprise platform built for AI agent workflows, as more companies and institutions across China adopt OpenClaw.

On Monday, the firm launched Accio Work, the international version of that platform. Alibaba said the system can autonomously handle all types of business operations for small and medium-sized enterprises. Earlier this month, the company also regrouped some of its AI teams under a new unit called Alibaba Token Hub, which is focused on building AI work platforms for enterprise users.

That business change is happening as Alibaba looks for new ways to stay profitable while competition in China pushes down token prices for AI models. The pressure is simple. Cheaper model usage means companies need other ways to make money. So Alibaba is going deeper into chips, cloud systems, and enterprise software at the same time.

Meanwhile, Huawei also stepped up its own AI hardware push with the launch of the Atlas 350 accelerator card for inference, unveiled at its China Partner Conference on Friday. Huawei Vice President Ma Haixu said the card runs on the new Ascend 950PR chip, which was designed to provide stronger computing power and storage for AI inferencing.

Zhang Dixuan, head of Huawei’s Ascend computing business, said the Atlas 350 delivers 1.56 petaflops of FP4 computing power, which is 2.8 times the level of Nvidia’s China specific H20 chip. He said the product is meant to match or beat other players in search recommendation, multimodal generation, and large language models. An accelerator card is a hardware unit made for a specific task and built to be added to a server.

The Huawei launch came as the US-sanctioned company keeps expanding its AI computing infrastructure with chips it developed on its own, including its Ascend AI line, without using American technology. At the same time, pressure is building on Nvidia from Washington. In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Republican Senator Jim Banks and Senator Elizabeth Warren called for “immediate action” over what they called a “large-scale diversion of advanced American AI chips to China” through Southeast Asia.

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The new 3.5 series models were made available first on Alibaba’s consumer AI app on Monday afternoon, followed by an official announcement made on blogging platform X around 10:00 AM GMT. The launch comes during a week in which several Chinese AI firms released the new versions of their AI systems, as Beijing continues to feed its ambitions to surpass the West in AI capabilities.

Alibaba releases Qwen-3.5 with multimodal AI expansion

According to Alibaba Cloud’s GitHub notes, Qwen-3.5 includes a unified vision-language foundation trained on trillions of multimodal tokens. The system can now process text, images, and structured inputs within a single framework.

During development of the new LLM version, the company used an efficient hybrid architecture and Gated Delta Networks with sparse Mixture-of-Experts routing to increase throughput, limit latency, and reduce computing costs. The model has also increased its linguistic support to 201 languages and dialects to expand its deployment worldwide.

A variant named Qwen-3.5-Open-Source was also released, featuring 397 billion parameters and a 256,000-token context window for longer reasoning chains and document processing. Despite releasing most of its AI LLM models as open source, Alibaba continues to keep its largest Max-series models closed for its commercial ecosystem.

The official X account of the Alibaba Qwen development team posted performance charts alongside the announcement, comparing Qwen-3.5 to GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro. In the GPQA Diamond category, which measures graduate-level reasoning, Qwen-3.5 scored 88.7, coming third among the other LLMs.

China reiterates its ambition to leapfrog the US in the AI war

In IFBench, a test evaluating instruction-following accuracy, Qwen-3.5 recorded a score of 76.5, outperforming all the other models. The results place Alibaba’s model within striking distance of proprietary competitors such as Gemini, GPT-series systems, and Claude models in multilingual and agent-based workloads.

Meanwhile, Alibaba Group’s shares fell 2.93% in global trading following the announcement, with the stock quoted at $25,160.00 as of February 13. The decline also extended to a five-day drop of nearly 6%, according to Google Finance data. China’s equity markets are closed for the Lunar New Year holiday from February 16 to February 23, with trading set to resume on February 24.

Over the past year, Chinese technology firms have doubled down on creating open-weight models, which is much different from the closed development approaches seen in Silicon Valley companies. Nearly every major Chinese AI developer introduced updated systems in the past seven days, with Alibaba’s DAMO Academy launching RynnBrain, a separate AI model aimed at robotics applications.

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The experiment was designed to move Qwen beyond question-answering and into full transactions. However, it quickly ran into capacity limits after a surge in user demand. Shoppers could use the coupon capabilities, together with a chatbot, to purchase products directly from Alibaba’s retail stores. The program is a component of Qwen’s 3 billion yuan ($433 million) investment, which is aimed at enhancing Qwen’s uptake during one of the busiest online retail seasons in China – the holiday period, and has an overall goal to drive up Qwen’s usage.

Alibaba pauses new experiment after demand overload

According to reports, Qwen‘s servers received over 10 million purchase requests through the chatbot in less than nine hours after it launched. The request completely overwhelmed the systems of the Qwen chatbot. By Saturday, the chatbot had stopped fulfilling orders, issuing automated replies to customers stating that no new credits could be given due to too many people signing up for the campaign.

On Qwen’s official Weibo account, it acknowledged the demand on their systems, stating. “The enthusiasm from people wanting to try out AI shopping is above our expectations!” the company said. “There are too many participants for ‘ Qwen free order ‘ at this time,” noting that their staff would do everything possible to stabilize operations. In another note, Qwen sought to reassure customers that the campaign had not been terminated and was still ongoing.

“We are doing everything to facilitate your continued participation in the campaign,” Qwen said. The coupons are still expected to work through February 28, 2026, so that customers will have additional time to redeem them after service has been stabilized. This development comes after Alibaba recently released the updated Qwen mobile app in January 2026. Most users reported a pleasant experience with the application.

Wu Jia, the company’s vice-president for consumer AI, showcased the app’s features as she ordered 40 cups of milk tea via Qwen at the launch event. Alibaba’s Qwen large language models (LLMs) were used to develop the mobile app. The Chinese tech company is trying to create an easy-to-use interface via its AI agent features. After linking Qwen to apps like Taobao and Alipay, users can tell it to do tasks such as ordering drinks or paying bills, instead of swiping the screen repeatedly.

Alibaba’s campaign is the first public test of their new AI strategy, dubbed “Agentic AI”, which aims to develop a version of Qwen equal to the role of Google’s Assistant as the main point of access for all of Alibaba’s apps and products. Users will use Qwen as their only way to navigate, buy, and pay across the entire Alibaba app ecosystem.

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The firm plans to make T-Head a competitor to Nvidia Corp. in the global and domestic AI accelerator markets. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is reportedly planning to list its chipmaking department, T-Head, as an independent company partly owned by its own employees. The first phase of this plan involves a structural reorganization to align the interests of key engineers and executives with the company’s future stock performance. Once the restructuring is complete, the group will explore an initial public offering.

Alibaba reportedly set for T-Head IPO

T-Head, also known as Pingtouge, is an important part of Alibaba’s “AI + Cloud” strategy. For years, the unit functioned primarily as an internal R&D department and designed custom silicon to improve the efficiency of Alibaba’s massive data centers. With China now having its access to the world’s most advanced AI chips, specifically those from Nvidia, restricted, Alibaba has transformed T-Head into a commercial provider of domestic hardware alternatives.

Investors are currently hungry for “Nvidia alternatives,” but Nvidia is still the global leader with a market capitalization hovering around $4.5 trillion. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) recently advised major domestic firms to stop purchasing certain Nvidia models, such as the RTX Pro 6000D, due to security and supply concerns. The complications between Nvidia and China have created a “vacuum” in the market that companies like Alibaba, Huawei, and Baidu are racing to fill.

The Hong Kong stock market is currently experiencing a record-breaking surge in tech listings. In the first two weeks of January 2026 alone, IPOs in the region raised over $4.3 billion. This “January boom” is due to Chinese AI and semiconductor firms seeking capital to fuel the country’s technological self-reliance. AI startups like MiniMax and its rival Zhipu AI both saw significant investor interest during their recent market debuts.

Earlier this month, Alibaba served as an investor for Montage Technology’s $900 million Hong Kong listing. Montage designs high-speed data flow chips for AI accelerators. Following the investment, the company saw its valuation climb toward $22 billion. T-Head’s newest flagship product, the T-Head Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), is designed specifically for high-volume AI inference tasks.

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Wu Jia, the company’s vice-president for consumer AI, showcased the app’s features. She ordered 40 cups of milk tea via Qwen at the launch event. Alibaba’s Qwen large language models (LLMs) were used to develop the mobile app. The Chinese tech company is trying to create an easy-to-use interface via its AI agent features.

After linking Qwen to apps like Taobao and Alipay, users can tell it to do tasks such as ordering drinks or paying bills, instead of swiping the screen repeatedly. In addition, the app includes Taobao Shangou for delivery, Fliggy for travel, and Amap for maps. All the integrated services are within the group’s wide consumer network.

Qwen app executes daily tasks without issues

Alibaba found 400 daily real-world tasks that the Qwen app can manage. Some of the tasks include reserving restaurant tables and monitoring price fluctuations. Qwen is no longer a chatbot. It is an AI-powered virtual life assistant ready to serve hundreds of millions of users, and consumers are praising the update.

They called the Qwen app a key to Alibaba’s AI tools and services. It frees users from lengthy tasks like comparing prices across vendors. Yang Tao, who works in Nanjing’s new energy vehicle sector, said that ordering meals with Qwen was easy. He added that it would especially help senior citizens who struggle with using various apps.

Zhuang Shuai, founder and chief analyst at Bailian Consulting, said Alibaba’s new Qwen app might change online shopping. He believes that e-commerce will no longer rely only on clicks or price. Instead, success will depend on having enough products and services for AI to analyze and recommend. Morgan Stanley also recently predicted that Qwen is set to become a comprehensive AI super-app and life assistant.

The bank predicts that consumer-facing (2C) applications and Agentic AI will take over the AI sector this year. Internet giants like ByteDance and Tencent are speeding up their 2C product releases. Google and Walmart teamed up to help users find and buy products from the US supermarket using Google’s AI assistant, Gemini. In contrast, Alibaba’s Qwen app provides many services beyond just online shopping.

Alibaba’s goal to make its chatbot app a strong AI assistant that changes how people use smart devices seems successful, say users and experts. Qwen surpassed 100 million monthly active users within two months of its public beta launch in November. Alibaba’s stock closed trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $165.40. It recovered from recent lows with mid-week gains of 1.7%, lifting the price to $169.90.

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