$BABA-W(09988)$ Alibaba is testing whether AI agents can run an e-commerce business over a full year. They have introduced MerchantBench, a benchmark that simulates 365 days of operations using over 98,000 real-world product records and 26 tools. The setup evaluates how agents handle pricing, inventory, cash flow, and other business decisions.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Alibaba Cloud is the only domestic cloud provider that has economies of scale, in-house chip development, and a first-tier self-developed large language model all at once. That combination makes its near-to-medium-term financial performance likely to beat market expectations, especially given its position as China's largest cloud vendor.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Hong Kong data centre wholesale pricing for hyperscalers reportedly jumped 90% from the start of 2026, driven by the Chinese AI boom. That kind of move in such a short window is pretty striking.
$BABA-W(09988)$ Alibaba just rolled out Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion parameter AI model. The pricing is noticeably lower than what OpenAI and Anthropic charge — $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
$BABA-W(09988)$ It is frustrating how these market makers keep suppressing the price right before the Hang Seng close. Looks like it is back to the usual suppression lever around 128.90-129.20. There are just too many of them involved in this.
$BABA-W(09988)$ When is earnings, anyway? The stock has had a solid month, but it is still miles away from last year's high. It just feels like this could be a banner earnings with a big move up. The catalyst, I think, will be cloud growth, similar to what Amazon did over a decade ago.
$BABA-W(09988)$ BABA's stake in CXMT is now valued at around $25 billion, which works out to roughly 10% of its current market cap. That feels pretty significant.