U.S.-listed shares in Chinese conglomerate Alibaba rose 4% in premarket trading on Wednesday after confirming that its Qwen AI model will be integrated into Apple systems in China.
“Qwen will be integrated into Apple Intelligence experiences within iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS for users in China,” an Alibaba spokesperson told CNBC.
The Cyberspace Administration of China included Apple AI services on a list of approved providers, which included products from homegrown companies like Huawei.
Alibaba’s ADR shares were last seen 3.7% higher. Apple has been approached for comment.
Alibaba’s U.S. listed shares year-to-date.
It follows a long route to a Beijing greenlight for Apple’s AI service since the offering was first announced in 2024. In that time, the technological rivalry between the U.S. and China has intensified as both countries race for dominance in AI.
Earlier this month, Alibaba banned employees from using Anthropic’s AI and U.S. lawmakers are considering how to curb the growing adoption of Chinese AI models by homegrown companies. U.S. tech giant Meta has reportedly been forced to dismantle its $2 billion acquisition of Chinese company Manus after Beijing’s order to unwind the deal.
The Apple-Qwen integration gives users the ability to access the model’s capabilities, “like text and image understanding and generation, without needing to jump between tools,” the Alibaba spokesperson added.
It comes after CNBC reported that Apple is in talks with a small Silicon Valley company that says it can shrink powerful artificial intelligence models enough to run directly on an iPhone, the startup’s CEO told CNBC on Tuesday.
PrismML, a Khosla Ventures-backed spinout from the California Institute of Technology, publicly released compressed versions of Alibaba’s open-source Qwen model on Tuesday.
The company said it reduced the model from roughly 54 GB to less than 4 GB, allowing all 27 billion of its parameters to run on an iPhone 15 or newer.
