Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) is emerging as a major force in the global artificial intelligence race, with its Qwen app topping worldwide growth charts in November. It has fueled renewed confidence in the company's cloud, e-commerce, and AI businesses.
The Chinese e-commerce juggernaut's new flagship AI app, Qwen, emerged as a leading AI app in November, according to third-party data released Wednesday, SCMP reported.
Aicpb.com, which tracks AI product popularity, reported that Qwen posted the highest monthly active user (MAU) growth worldwide at 149%, pushing the app to 18.34 million MAUs and making it the 24th most-used AI app globally just two weeks after entering public beta.
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Li Bangzhu, founder of Aicpb.com, said Qwen's rapid rise reflects the strength of Alibaba's underlying large language models.
Qwen gives users access to multimodal tools ranging from deep research to image generation and slide creation, all powered by Alibaba's Qwen family of foundational models.
Alibaba's Performance
Alibaba stock gained over 90% year-to-date, as its AI and cloud computing businesses gain traction.
Analysts struck an upbeat tone on Alibaba as the company's cloud momentum and advances in AI models helped lift the stock despite rising U.S.–China tensions.
Goldman Sachs, Daiwa Securities, and China International Capital Corporation (CICC) pointed to Alibaba Cloud's accelerating growth, stronger multimodal AI capabilities, and early profit recovery at Taobao and Tmall as key drivers of the rebound.
The app quickly gained traction, climbing into the top three trending free apps in Apple Inc's (NASDAQ:AAPL) mainland China and Hong Kong app stores within days of launch.
Qwen's growth outpaced major Chinese rivals in November.
ByteDance's Doubao—China's largest AI app with 167.91 million MAUs—grew 5.33%, while DeepSeek's flagship app saw MAUs decline 3.72%.
Globally, OpenAI's ChatGPT remained the leader with 775.57 million MAUs, though its growth slowed to below 1%.
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google posted MAU growth of 16.17% to 88.92 million, helped by the strong reception of its Gemini 3 Pro model released on November 18.
Li said the latest figures also showcase the rising potential of AI glasses.
Meta View, the companion app for Meta Platforms Inc's (NASDAQ:META) AI glasses, recorded the world's third-fastest MAU growth at 44.42%.
The category is becoming increasingly competitive as Chinese tech giants roll out alternatives to Meta's new Ray-Ban Display glasses.
On Thursday, Alibaba entered the market with its Quark AI glasses, joining Li Auto Inc (NASDAQ:LI) and Xiaomi (OTC:XIACY).
BABA Price Action: BABA shares were down 1.86% at $158.13 in pre-market trading on Wednesday.
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