Alibaba stock is up on news of Apple AI partnership

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is up 3% in premarket trading after a big rally overnight in Hong Kong following a report from The Information yesterday that it was partnering with Apple to develop AI features for users in China.

Perhaps this relationship may help the iPhone maker sidestep lots of red tape in a major market. Apple sales have slid in China, one of the many markets where its latest AI phone features aren’t available (not that Apple Intelligence has wowed outside China, either).

This is just the latest win for China in the AI space, and the latest positive catalyst for Alibaba in particular, which is up more than 30% year to date to reapproach its peaks from the last three years.

A few weeks ago, Chinese startup DeepSeek upended the AI industry as we knew it by supposedly creating a model comparable to its US counterparts for a fraction of the cost. A week later, Alibaba said its latest AI model Qwen 2.5-Max “outperforms... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B.”