Alibaba

You can’t embargo the most valuable commodity on Earth and expect everyone to play nice. US prosecutors just dropped their biggest AI hardware enforcement action yet — a $2.5 billion smuggling operation that funneled restricted Nvidia servers through Bangkok directly into Chinese hands. The details read like a spy thriller. The implications hit like a freight train. The Operation Bangkok-based OBON Corp allegedly purchased massive quantities of Super Micro servers packed with Nvidia’s H200 and B300 chips — the silicon that powers frontier AI training. Instead of deploying them in Thailand’s growing AI ecosystem, the servers were rerouted to China. Alibaba is named as an end customer. ...

A mystery model appears on the world’s top video generation benchmark. No name. No branding. No press release. It immediately vaults to #1, beating everything else by a decisive margin. The AI community spends days playing detective. Then Alibaba raises its hand. HappyHorse-1.0 — yes, that’s really what they called it — is now the best AI video generator on the planet. And Alibaba just gave it away for free. ...

Nvidia’s deepest moat was never the silicon. It was CUDA — the software ecosystem that made every AI developer on Earth, including China’s, completely dependent on Nvidia’s way of doing things. You could build a faster chip, but if developers had to rewrite their entire codebase to use it? Dead on arrival. Huawei just found the side door. The Ascend 950PR, paired with Huawei’s overhauled CANN Next software stack, has reportedly won over ByteDance and Alibaba — two of China’s largest AI consumers. After years of Beijing practically begging its tech giants to go domestic, Huawei may have finally built a chip they actually want to use. ...

Everyone’s fighting over GPUs. Alibaba just changed the question. On Tuesday, Alibaba’s DAMO Academy unveiled the XuanTie C950 — a 5-nanometer server processor built on open-source RISC-V architecture. It’s the highest-performing RISC-V CPU ever made. But the interesting part isn’t the benchmarks. It’s the thesis behind the chip: that AI agents need fundamentally different silicon than AI chatbots. While Nvidia, AMD, and Intel wage war over who can build the biggest parallel processor for training models, Alibaba is making a deliberate bet on what comes after training. And the logic is harder to dismiss than you’d think. ...

Seven words on X brought one of the world’s most important AI teams to its knees. “Me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen.” That was Lin Junyang — the technical architect behind Alibaba’s Qwen model family — on March 3, 2026. No corporate farewell letter. No diplomatic transition plan. Just a gut-punch goodbye that knocked Alibaba’s stock down 4.5% in Hong Kong and left the future of open-source AI’s most prolific Chinese project hanging by a thread. ...

Alibaba just dropped a model with 397 billion parameters that only uses 17 billion of them. And it might be the most important AI release of 2026 so far. Qwen 3.5 landed on the eve of Chinese New Year — 60% cheaper to run than its predecessor, 8x faster at decoding, and supposedly beating GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro on multiple benchmarks. Bold claims. But even if you discount the scoreboard, the engineering underneath tells a story worth paying attention to. ...