Apple has officially integrated Alibaba’s Qwen models into Apple Intelligence for users in China as of November 4, 2026. The partnership follows a competitive selection process that included major Chinese tech firms such as Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance, and DeepSeek.
Alibaba launched its Tongyi Qianwen model family in April 2023. By the first seven months of 2026, Hugging Face recorded over 2 billion downloads of Qwen models. The company released Qwen3 in April 2025, featuring a mixture-of-experts architecture that activates 22 billion parameters out of 235 billion to optimize inference costs.
The development team faced significant internal turnover in early 2026, including the departures of technical leader Junyang Lin and post-training chief Bowen Yu. Reports indicated internal friction regarding resource allocation and organizational structure, which led Alibaba to consolidate its model-development teams under CEO Eddie Wu in June 2026.
Alibaba has committed substantial capital to its AI and cloud infrastructure. In February 2025, the company pledged at least ¥380 billion to be spent over three years. By May 2026, Alibaba announced that total investment in these areas would exceed the initial ¥380 billion target.
