China's AI trade is quickly moving from infrastructure to applications. Watch these stocks

By Adam Clark

Nvidia stock was rising early Friday following a report that Chinese authorities will permit sales of its hardware in the country.

Nvidia shares were up 1.6% at $187.74 in premarket trading. The stock rose 0.8% on Thursday.

Shares were climbing after Bloomberg reported that Beijing has authorized Chinese firms including Alibaba to prepare orders for Nvidia's H200 chips.

Chinese companies would be willing to buy around 1.5 million of the H200 chips, representing roughly $30 billion in revenue, according to KeyBanc analyst John Vinh. Nvidia has agreed to pass on a 25% cut of the sales to the U.S. government.

Manufacturers in the supply chain for Nvidia's H200 chips — designed specifically for the Chinese market — had previously paused production after customs officials blocked shipments of the hardware, the Financial Times reported. However, Beijing's stance now appears to be softening.

Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices was rising 2.7% and Broadcom was down 0.3% in premarket trading. AMD also hopes to sell chips in China, while Broadcom works with ByteDance on custom AI chips.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

By Adam Clark

Alibaba stock was rising early Thursday. It is the latest Chinese company looking to take advantage of a frenzy of interest in domestic semiconductor makers by listing its internal chip maker.

The company is considering restructuring its T-Head chip unit as a business partly owned by employees before exploring an initial public offering for the business, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Alibaba didn't immediately respond to a request for comment early on Thursday. Its American depositary receipts were up 3.6% in premarket trading, having almost doubled in the past 12 months.

Alibaba is one of multiple Chinese companies hoping to take advantage of the gap left by AI chip leader Nvidia's current absence from China's artificial-intelligence chip market.

Chip designers Moore Threads Technology and MetaX Integrated Circuits racked up triple-digit gains when they made their stock market debuts last month and Shanghai Biren Technology soared 76% on its first day of trading earlier this month. Search-engine company Baidu has submitted a listing application for its own AI chip unit Kunlunxin.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang previously said China represents a $50 billion market for AI infrastructure, growing at 50% a year. He has lobbied hard for U.S. permission to sell chips to Chinese customers, arguing it is better to lock China's companies into dependence on American hardware. That has raised the ire of Beijing, which has discouraged its companies from buying Nvidia chips.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

Alibaba Group Holding’s (BABA) American Depository Receipts (ADRs) were up more than 5% in Thursday’s pre-market trade after a report stated that the company is planning to list its AI chipmaking unit.

According to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter, Alibaba initially plans to restructure the unit, T-Head, as a business partly owned by the company’s employees.

Subsequently, Alibaba will consider launching an initial public offering, although the timeline is not known yet, the report added. Alibaba’s IPO plans for T-Head are still in the early stages, so finer details about the valuation are not certain yet.

Taking On US Dominance

Reports of Alibaba taking its chipmaking unit public come amid ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China, especially in the semiconductor space. Concerns in the U.S. date back to former President Joe Biden’s term, which have continued into President Trump’s second term.

Last week, the U.S. announced 25% tariffs on exports of Nvidia Corp.’s (NVDA) H200 AI chip, as well as Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s (AMD) MI325X chip. In December, President Trump announced that tariffs would be levied on Chinese chip imports over what he termed as the country’s “unreasonable” pursuit of dominance in the chip industry. However, these levies have been pushed back to 2027.

On its part, China has been pushing to develop its domestic chip industry. On Wednesday, the China Institute of Atomic Energy successfully developed the country’s first tandem-type high-energy hydrogen ion implanter, named Power-750H, according to a China Daily report. The technology is key in manufacturing advanced power semiconductors.

According to TheFly, analysts at Arete upgraded Alibaba to ‘Buy’ from ‘Neutral’ on Wednesday, with a price target of $190. This implies an upside of nearly 13% from the stock’s closing price on Wednesday.

Here’s How Stocktwits Users Reacted

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits about Alibaba was in the ‘neutral’ territory, while the company was the second-most-trending ticker on the platform at the time of writing.

One bullish user called Alibaba’s IPO plans for its AI chipmaking unit great news. “Let’s continue the rally,” the user added.

https://stocktwits.com/Lvly/message/642517239

BABA ADRs are up 14% year-to-date and 98% over the past 12 months.

Tencent is better positioned than DeepSeek to create value from AI, as it can embed its Hunyuan model into revenue engines, Morningstar analyst Ivan Su says in a note. He notes that focusing too much on AI model capability benchmarks can be a distraction and miss the bigger picture. Tencent operates an integrated ecosystem across gaming, advertising, search, music and enterprise software, which produces a stream of proprietary user-behavior data each day. This allows the company to rapidly test improvements in its Hunyuan model, which translates to direct impact on user experiences and profit and loss performance. On the contrary, DeepSeek's models are impressive, "but pure model-based businesses are vulnerable to capability commoditization and experience much slower translation of capability into outcomes," Su adds. (jason.chau@wsj.com)

By George Glover

China's Alibaba is following the example of U.S. rivals OpenAI, Alphabet, and Microsoft by enabling its artificial-intelligence app to go shopping for users.

The online retailer said at a launch event on Thursday that it has connected its Qwen AI app to its core ecosystem, including its own e-commerce and online travel agency platforms.

The update will allow users to instruct Qwen to carry out tasks like ordering groceries and booking flights, without having to leave the app.

Alibaba stock didn't get much of a boost from the rollout.

The company's American depositary receipts slid 0.2% ahead of Thursday's U.S. open. They are up 16% already in 2026, surging higher thanks to surging AI demand in China and hopes that Beijing will roll out a stimulus package to boost the Asian nation's economy.

AI providers have expanded into shopping as part of a push to develop agentic AI systems — referring to tools that can take action on users' behalf, rather than merely generate content from prompts.

OpenAI's ChatGPT announced a feature called Instant Checkout in September, allowing a user to talk to ChatGPT to decide what to buy, then complete the transaction a few clicks later without leaving the chatbot. OpenAI partnered with Stripe for payments, and Walmart, Etsy, and Shopify for products.

Shopify has also partnered with Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot to enable AI-native shopping on those two platforms. Google on Sunday unveiled a slew of agentic AI tools for retailers including home-improvement chain Lowe's.

Write to George Glover at george.glover@dowjones.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

By Tracy Qu

Alibaba Group is rolling out a major update of its Qwen app, integrating the chatbot into its ecosystem and allowing it to carry out tasks on users' behalf.

With the update, users can ask Qwen to perform actions such as ordering milk tea and booking flights, rather than navigating different apps by themselves. Alibaba has connected the Qwen app to the company's core ecosystem, including e-commerce platform Taobao and online travel agency Fliggy. This means users can complete transactions entirely within Qwen without navigating to other Alibaba apps, though this functionality is only supported for food-delivery transactions for now.

"What we are launching today represents a shift from models that understand to systems that act--deeply connected to real-world services," said Wu Jia, a vice president at Alibaba, during at a launch event in Hangzhou, China, on Thursday.

The Qwen app also debuted a new "task assistant" feature, currently available for invited users. The assistant can help users to make phone calls, or process up to 100 documents simultaneously.

The rollout reflects Alibaba's broader push to turn Qwen from a standalone chatbot to an entry point for its consumer internet ecosystem, as large technology companies race to develop AI systems that can move beyond answering questions to executing real-world tasks across multiple services.

The move comes amid a global push to make AI systems more agent-like. In October, OpenAI integrated a number of apps that users can interact with inside the chatbot, such as music-streaming app Spotify and travel agency Booking.com.

Launched in November, the Qwen app has surpassed 100 million monthly active users within two months of its release.

Write to Tracy Qu at tracy.qu@wsj.com