Shares of Alibaba-W (ASX: 09988) have risen by more than 5%. At the time of writing, the stock is up 5.06% to HK$118.3, with a turnover of HK$2.374 billion.

On July 19th, Alibaba unveiled the preview version of its flagship large language model, Qwen3.8 Max. This model boasts a massive parameter scale of 2.4 trillion. The company has positioned it as "one of the most powerful models available today, comparable to leading frontier AI models," and stated it ranks second globally only to Anthropic's Fable 5. Concurrently, Alibaba has committed to open-sourcing the complete model weights "soon."

It is noteworthy that recently, Moonshot AI, a startup backed by Alibaba, made waves in global tech stocks with its 2.8 trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model, which briefly set a new record for the "largest open model in history."

In a separate development, Alibaba's Qwen will be integrated as an AI capability into Apple's products. This move is seen by analysts as a significant commercial milestone for Alibaba's AI business, expected to provide a short-term catalyst for the stock's sentiment.

The strategic partnership with Apple is viewed as a strong endorsement for Qwen, validating the model's performance, its adaptability for on-device use, and its compliance with privacy standards. This is expected to benefit future customer expansion and increase token usage.

Alibaba's Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) revenue prospects are considered robust. The current valuation of this business segment is significantly lower than that of pure-play model companies. It is anticipated that as revenue growth accelerates, it will enhance the company's overall valuation.