Alibaba Stock Breaks Past 52-Week High As AI Frenzy Heats Up

Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA) stock closed approximately 5% higher on Monday, a surge driven by growing investor confidence in the company’s aggressive push into cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

This rally positioned Alibaba as the best-performing Chinese tech stock in September, according to a Bloomberg report.

The stock’s year-to-date gain of over 112% has significantly outpaced the NYSE Composite index’s 13% returns, a performance attributed to its escalating AI endeavors. The stock is currently trading above its 52-week high of $181.34.

Also Read: Alibaba Partners With Nvidia To Power Robots And Self-Driving Cars

Alibaba’s strategic focus on AI has yielded tangible results, with its Qwen3-Omni multimodal AI system ascending to the top of Hugging Face’s trending model list.

The Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B variant achieved the top rank, closely followed by the company’s Qwen-Image-Edit-2509, as reported by the SCMP.

Alibaba’s cloud unit, which launched the Qwen3-Omni series last week, describes it as the first native end-to-end model that unifies text, images, audio, and video.

Benchmark data indicates that Qwen3-Omni has outperformed its predecessor, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, as well as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google Gemini-2.5-Flash, in audio recognition and image and video comprehension.

The dominance of Alibaba’s open-source models is evident on Hugging Face, where they now constitute half of the top 10 rankings, surpassing Meta Platforms’ (NASDAQ:META) Llama.

This success is part of a broader trend, with Chinese firms like Tencent (OTC:TCEHY), DeepSeek, and OpenBMB increasingly dominating the Hugging Face rankings.

This market momentum is reflected in a series of upward revisions to analyst ratings. Morningstar senior equity analyst Chelsey Tam recently called Alibaba undervalued, citing its increased spending on overseas data centers, robust adoption of its open-source AI models, enhanced chip performance, and rising cloud revenues.

Similarly, Morgan Stanley analysts, led by Gary Yu, expressed optimism following the company’s conference in Hangzhou, where Alibaba committed to further AI investment and announced a partnership with Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).

The firm has since lifted its cloud growth estimates to 32% in fiscal 2026 and 40% in fiscal 2027, citing heavier capital expenditures, model upgrades, new partnerships, and faster international expansion.

Alibaba’s stock is currently on track for its best monthly performance since its 2019 Hong Kong listing, coinciding with its last quarter’s report of triple-digit growth in AI-related products and its cloud unit exceeding sales expectations.

The renewed interest is further underscored by Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management, which has reopened positions in Alibaba’s ADRs for the first time in four years.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Marvin Chen and Jason Liao, Alibaba’s full-stack cloud-AI integration, along with Baidu’s progress in model deployment, could give Chinese equity markets a stronger position in the global AI narrative.

Price Action: BABA stock was trading higher by 1.16% to $181.99 premarket at last check Tuesday.

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