Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE:BABA) stock rose nearly 4% in Wednesday’s premarket trading as improving sentiment toward Chinese equities coincided with the company’s push to expand its Qwen artificial intelligence ecosystem. The gains followed reports that the People’s Bank of China plans to meet with regulators and major banks to discuss improvements to a lending program that supports share buybacks and increased shareholdings, after the CSI 300 fell 8.5% and recorded 12 consecutive weekly declines. Separately, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) plans to integrate Alibaba’s Qwen AI models into Apple Intelligence in China, with a rollout expected in December, supporting Siri, writing tools and visual intelligence including text generation, image creation and document analysis. During Singles’ Day, a Taobao and Tmall livestream sold nearly 100,000 QwenWork monthly subscriptions in about 30 minutes, representing roughly 2 trillion AI tokens. Chairman Joe Tsai said open-source technology remains central to Alibaba’s AI strategy; Qwen now has more than 470 open-source variants, over 4 billion downloads and more than 330,000 derivative models, and Alibaba is using roughly $25 billion in free cash flow from its core e-commerce business to fund AI development. Alibaba is expected to report earnings Nov. 24, 2026, with analysts forecasting earnings of $1.39 per share, up from 61 cents