Apple Intelligence is coming to China powered by Alibaba's Qwen — and markets loved it
China's regulator approved Apple Intelligence running Alibaba's Qwen model on iPhones. Alibaba's shares added billions on the news.
Apple Intelligence finally has a green light for China — and it will arrive speaking Qwen. The country’s cyberspace regulator approved the launch of Apple’s AI services, built on a deal that integrates Alibaba’s model across the company’s operating systems: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro.
For Apple, this removes one of the biggest commercial roadblocks of recent years: selling iPhones in a giant market where its AI simply couldn’t switch on. For Alibaba, it crowns Qwen as the model the world’s biggest consumer brand picked for China.
Why did Alibaba’s shares jump?
Because the market did the maths quickly. Alibaba’s US-listed shares rose more than 4% on the news — a gain worth roughly 17 billion dollars in market value — and the enthusiasm spread to Hong Kong, where Baidu climbed too. Apple added close to 2%, in a month when it reclaimed the title of world’s most valuable company on its way towards 5 trillion.
One technical detail explains much of the optimism: Qwen was compressed from 54 GB down to under 4 GB, small enough to run locally on iPhones as old as the 15. This isn’t cloud-tethered AI — it’s the model living inside the phone, with text and image features built into the system.
The geographic irony wasn’t lost on anyone: while Beijing opens the door, Brussels is still arguing with Apple over Siri’s European delays — and the announcement lands days after Xi Jinping made AI a national banner at WAIC. Official details sit with Apple and Alibaba.
In the global AI chess game, Hangzhou won this week’s move.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Charlie fong / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
