Alibaba Group Holding unveiled a sweeping suite of new artificial intelligence products spanning models, cloud infrastructure and chips on Wednesday, positioning itself to become China’s “AI factory” as autonomous agents gain prominence.Speaking at the Alibaba Cloud Summit in Hangzhou, Liu Weiguang, senior vice-president of Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, framed AI as a new form of manufacturing that generates revenue through “training and inference factories”.“What we’re building is China’s AI factory,” Liu said, describing Alibaba as the only AI and cloud company in the country operating “all five layers of the full AI stack”, which bridges chips, agentic cloud, AI models, model service platforms and agentic applications.Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.During the event, Alibaba announced Qwen3.7-Max, the company’s latest proprietary large language model designed as “a robust foundation” for AI agents.According to Alibaba, the model excels at agentic coding, complex reasoning and “long-horizon tasks” – complex, multi-step missions requiring continuous decision-making over extended periods. The company said Qwen3.7-Max could autonomously operate for up to 35 hours without performance degradation.Zhou Jingren, the former chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud who was recently appointed as the chief AI architect of the newly formed Alibaba Group Technology Committee, said the model consistently ranked among the top tier on various benchmarks and outperformed all other AI models in China.
Alibaba unveils new Qwen model, custom chips in bid to become China’s AI factory
The world’s biggest e-commerce group launches Qwen3.7-Max, its new large language model designed as a robust foundation for AI models.









