Alibaba Group’s Qwen mobile app has surged past 10 million downloads in just seven days following its public beta launch on November 17, outpacing the early growth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and domestic rival DeepSeek.
The milestone, announced in an official WeChat blog post on November 24, sent Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares up 4.8% to HK$154.50 and helped lift the Hang Seng Tech Index to a six-month high.
The rapid adoption follows Alibaba’s decision to consolidate its fragmented AI offerings into a single, unified Qwen app earlier this month. Industry analysts attribute the explosive growth to several decisive advantages:
A captive domestic market of 1.3 billion users, where ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other Western models remain blocked.Zero-cost access to advanced features, undercutting subscription-based rivals by as much as 97%.
Deep integration with Alibaba’s ecosystem — Taobao, Alipay, Ele.me, and DingTalk — turning the app into an “everything AI” that can shop, order food, book travel, and generate documents without switching interfaces.
Heavy promotion during the recent Singles’ Day shopping festival, Alibaba’s largest revenue event of the year.
Qwen is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s open-source Qwen3-Max model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4 on key benchmarks for coding, mathematics, and multilingual reasoning.
With a 128K-token context window and support for 29 languages, the model has already seen over 600 million global downloads since its 2023 debut.
High-profile endorsements highlight its credibility. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has publicly stated that his company “heavily relies on Qwen” for operational workflows, while NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently praised its growing dominance in open-source AI.
Alibaba has backed these advances with aggressive investment, committing $16.55 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure capital expenditure over the past four quarters, according to disclosures from CFO Xu Hong.
The success arrives amid a broader re-rating of Chinese technology giants. The combined market capitalization of China’s leading internet and AI companies — including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance — stands at roughly $2.5 trillion, compared with approximately $21.5 trillion for the U.S. “Magnificent Seven” (Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla).
Chinese tech stocks now trade at an average forward P/E of 18×, a 40% discount to their American counterparts, despite stronger year-to-date performance and accelerating domestic AI adoption. Analysts increasingly describe the sector as one of the most undervalued large-cap opportunities globally.
Alibaba is preparing an international rollout of the Qwen app and plans to embed AI agents directly into its e-commerce platforms. Rival ByteDance has pledged 150 billion yuan ($21 billion) in AI spending for 2025, while Baidu continues to offer its Ernie models free of charge.
Investors will watch closely when Alibaba reports fiscal second-quarter earnings on November 26, with consensus estimates calling for 243.2 billion CNY in revenue and 5.78 CNY in earnings per share.
The market’s primary question: how quickly the company can translate consumer enthusiasm into sustainable monetization across e-commerce, cloud, and enterprise licensing.For now, Qwen’s meteoric rise serves as tangible proof that accessible, ecosystem-integrated AI can capture users faster than premium walled gardens — and that China’s AI industry has moved from follower to frontrunner in the consumer space.
Naorem Mohen is the Editor of Signpost News. Explore his views and opinion on X: @laimacha.
Naorem Mohen
View More PostsNaorem Mohen is the Editor of Signpost News. Explore his views and opinion on X: @laimacha.
