Alibaba and other Chinese tech stocks rose on Thursday, benefiting from an ongoing artificial-intelligence rally.
Shares in the e-commerce platform Alibaba closed 3.5% higher in Hong Kong trading, while Baidu gained 4.5% and JD.com rose 3.1%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index added 1.6%.
Alibaba's American depositary receipts climbed 2.8% ahead of the open, after rising 2.3% on Wednesday. The shares surged last month after the company hiked spending on AI, unveiled a new language model and partnered with Nvidia.
Now there's more evidence of its ambitions starting to pay off. The tech conglomerate's AI-driven mapping app -- Amap -- logged more than 360 million daily active users on the first day of China's eight-day National Day holiday Wednesday, a record for the platform.
On top of that, excitement has been building about DeepSeek's newest AI model, which the tech company said had better training and reasoning and can operate at a lower cost.
Alibaba's ADRs are now up more than 115% in 2025, while the Hong Kong shares have risen 122% this year. The stock's strength this week comes as "global investors look for alternatives to the highly stretched Magnificent Seven valuations," Scope Markets analyst Joshua Mahony said.
Meanwhile, preliminary data showed that China residential home sales steadied in September, boosting hopes that the Asian country may soon be able to exit a seemingly never-ending property-market crisis.
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