Alibaba launches Qwen3.8-Max AI model, HK shares surge 7%

Published Aug 6, 09:59 PM UTC

Alibaba unveiled its largest AI model, Qwen3.8-Max, on August 3, 2026, sending its Hong Kong-listed shares up 7%. The 2.4 trillion-parameter model uses a mixture-of-experts design activating only 95 billion parameters at a time, reducing costs and latency. Alibaba plans to release the model's weights publicly, aiming to drive developer traffic to Alibaba Cloud, which reported 38% YoY revenue growth in Q4 FY2026. However, the model trails Moonshot's Kimi K3 (2.8 trillion parameters) and faces pricing pressure from DeepSeek's V4-Flash at $0.14 per million tokens. The article compares Alibaba's open-source cloud strategy with Baidu's vertically integrated ERNIE enterprise approach. Hedge fund ownership declined for both companies last quarter. Alibaba trades at a forward P/E of 19.19 versus Baidu's 24.27, with lower short interest at 1.79% of float compared to Baidu's 3.68%.