Alibaba Group BABA stock traded higher on Monday as its artificial intelligence endeavors continue to spur investor optimism.

The e-commerce juggernaut accelerated its AI push by unveiling Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, a foundation model that rivals larger peers while being smaller and more cost-efficient.

The model runs nearly 13 times smaller than Alibaba’s largest predecessor, delivers up to 10 times faster performance, and slashes training costs by 90%, SCMP reported on Sunday.

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Developers credited breakthroughs like Gated DeltaNet, citing these innovations allowing the model to match DeepSeek-V3.1’s performance with only 3 billion active parameters.

Compact enough to run on a single Nvidia NVDA H200 GPU, the model quickly trended on Hugging Face with nearly 20,000 downloads in its first day.

Alibaba’s progress in AI has coincided with a sharp rally in its stock, which has gained 83% year-to-date, far outpacing the 12% return of the NYSE Composite Index.

The company is also expanding its AI reach in consumer services. On Friday, Alibaba launched Amap Street Stars, an AI-powered alternative to Alphabet’s GOOGL GOOG Google Maps.

The platform attracted more than 40 million users on its first day and now ranks 1.6 million restaurants, hotels, and attractions, SCMP reported.

JPMorgan analysts called the initiative a significant step towards Alibaba’s vision for a super-app strategy, adding that Amap is increasingly positioned as Alibaba’s primary entry point for offline local services, running parallel to Taobao as the online traffic entrance.

They also said the service could deal “another hit to Meituan’s MPNGY cash cow,” as Amap directly challenges Dianping, Meituan’s review platform and a core driver of its instant commerce revenue.

Price Action: BABA stock is trading higher by 2.06% to $158.26 premarket at last check Monday.

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