Spring Festival First Battle, Alibaba AI "Aircraft Carrier" Begins to Take Shape

On New Year’s Eve 2026, Alibaba officially open-sourced the next-generation large model Qwen3.5-Plus, dubbed the “Most Powerful Source God” by AI enthusiasts. Compared to previous generations of Qwen large language models, Qwen3.5 has achieved a generational leap from a pure text model to a native multimodal model.

In the early hours of the first day of the Lunar New Year, data released by Alibaba’s Qwen App showed that during the Spring Festival activities, over 130 million people nationwide experienced AI shopping for the first time, with a total of 5 billion “Qwen Help Me” requests sent. Qwen has rapidly become a national-level AI assistant.

From open-sourcing top-tier large models to full-ecosystem application deployment, Alibaba’s AI is exploding on two fronts. This Spring Festival, Alibaba demonstrated through concrete actions that AI can both reach for the stars and guard human everyday life.

Qwen: Achieving National-Level AI Assistant Status

How to enhance the commercialization of AI applications for end users has become a new challenge faced by global tech companies.

If last year’s Spring Festival was when DeepSeek gained recognition through deep thinking, this year’s Spring Festival saw Qwen break into the mainstream with its “AI for Tasks” approach—“Qwen Help Me” is becoming a new user habit in the AI era.

On February 6, Qwen launched its Spring Festival campaign. During this period, over 130 million people nationwide used AI for shopping for the first time, with users making 5 billion “Qwen Help Me” requests. Qwen officially entered the ranks of national-level AI assistants. It was the first time globally that an AI Agent completed large-scale real-world task execution and commercial validation, achieving a deep integration of “instructions” and “transactions,” reshaping how users interact with the internet. This not only makes AI truly accessible to all but also marks an important milestone in AI development history.

According to the latest data from QuestMobile, Qwen’s daily active users (DAU) reached 73.52 million, far surpassing Yuanbao’s 18.28 million and approaching Doubao’s 78.71 million. This means that in less than two months, Qwen has matched the user base of industry-leading products accumulated over three years.

Alibaba data shows that in the first two days of the Spring Festival, user orders for AI ticket purchases increased 22-fold month-over-month, and AI bookings for flights and transportation tickets grew over 7 times; during the holiday period, AI movie ticket orders surged 372 times compared to the previous period, with AI orders in third- and fourth-tier cities skyrocketing by 782 times.

Notably, nearly half of AI orders came from county markets. The convenience of completing operations with a single command allowed nearly 4 million users over 60 years old to try AI shopping for the first time.

Leveraging Alibaba’s ecosystem, Qwen can seamlessly coordinate services across platforms like Taobao, Alipay, Taobao Flash Sale, Fliggy, Amap, and Damai. Future plans include launching features such as AI ride-hailing, mobile phone recharge, and Amap street sweep group buying.

Targeting General Artificial Intelligence

On New Year’s Eve, Alibaba open-sourced the new generation large model Qwen3.5-Plus, which matches the performance of Gemini-3 Pro and tops the list of the world’s most powerful open-source large models. Qwen3.5 has undergone a comprehensive overhaul of its underlying architecture. The released Plus version has a total of 397 billion parameters, with only 17 billion active parameters, achieving “small parameters” for “big performance,” outperforming Qwen3-Max with over a trillion parameters.

Alibaba open-sourced Qwen3.5-Plus, which rivals Gemini-3 Pro in performance.

From Qwen2.5 and Qwen3 to Qwen3.5, the past two years have seen multiple breakthroughs in the capabilities of open-source large models, all achieved by Qwen. Currently, Qwen has surpassed 1 billion downloads globally, with monthly downloads exceeding the combined total of ranks 2 through 8, and over 200,000 derivative models built by developers—recognized as the world’s leading open-source large model.

Industry experts say that during this Spring Festival, Qwen demonstrated its true killer feature.

Unlike previous pure text models, Qwen3.5 has achieved a generational leap from text to native multimodal capabilities. The model significantly expanded training data in Chinese, English, multiple languages, STEM, and reasoning. It leads in all dimensions of benchmarks such as reasoning, programming, and agent intelligence, even surpassing closed-source top products like GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 Pro.

Qwen3.5 is just the beginning of Alibaba’s multimodal strategy; future efforts will focus on all-in-one multimodal integration, aiming for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Currently, Alibaba is among the world leaders in multimodal understanding and generation.

A week ago, Qwen released Qwen-image-2.0, which integrates image generation and editing, ranking among the top three globally on the authoritative AI Arena leaderboard, dubbed the “Nano Banana Pro” of China. Now, with further breakthroughs in visual understanding, Qwen3.5 advances toward full multimodal capabilities.

Industry observers believe that the two routes—model development and multimodal integration—are not isolated but mutually reinforcing, building toward full multimodal technology. Alibaba aims to evolve large models from handling single tasks to possessing comprehensive understanding and generation across text, vision, and speech, truly achieving “understandable, clear listening, expressive, and executable” capabilities, ultimately moving toward artificial general intelligence.

A Giant Tech Company in the Making

Qwen3.5-Plus API pricing starts as low as 0.8 yuan per million tokens, which is only 1/18 of Gemini-3 Pro at the same performance level, reflecting Alibaba’s deep integration of AI computing power and model innovation.

At the same time, Alibaba boasts the most comprehensive and rich ecosystem and fulfillment services in China, covering all scenarios from dining and entertainment to travel and accommodation. AI has further deeply integrated into Alibaba’s ecosystem, bringing unprecedented convenience in the AI era.

Behind this dual-front AI push is Alibaba’s accumulated strength. The “Tongyun Ge”—a golden triangle formed by the Taoist Institute, Alibaba Cloud, and Pingtouge—gives Alibaba control over core AI computing power.

On January 22, multiple media outlets reported that Alibaba plans to support Pingtouge, its chip company, for future independent listing. Industry insiders see Pingtouge as a key strategic move in Alibaba’s AI layout, with chips, cloud, and models forming the “black land” for Alibaba’s long-term AI development.

As the “Tongyun Ge” triangle takes shape, Alibaba has become one of the few global tech giants—and the only Chinese company—to achieve full-stack vertical integration of “self-developed AI chips, world-class cloud platform, and world-class large models.”

In the global AI race, only vertical integration can achieve ultimate optimization, which is the core logic behind Alibaba’s creation of “Tongyun Ge.”

This strategic layout was not built overnight: as early as the 2017 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba announced the establishment of DAMO Academy to focus on chips and cutting-edge technology; in 2018, Pingtouge was founded, simultaneously launching large model research. Before the AI explosion, Alibaba had already invested heavily in foundational technologies.

Google demonstrated the value of full-stack integration with its “Gemini model + TPU chips + cloud platform,” but Alibaba is surpassing this model. With self-developed chips, Alibaba can tailor “Zhenwu” chips for the Qwen architecture and optimize resource scheduling through “the most chip-savvy cloud.” Alibaba Cloud is no longer just a traditional cloud platform but a “hardware-software integrated AI supercomputer.”

With world-leading cloud infrastructure, independently developed high-end AI chips, and the most powerful open-source large models globally, Alibaba in the future will become a giant tech company akin to a carrier of AI infrastructure—building the “water, electricity, coal” of the AI era.