Upon the opening of Hong Kong stocks today, Alibaba's share price surged nearly 9% to HK$123, marking a new high since last October. Since the beginning of the year, Alibaba's stock has appreciated by over 40% overall.

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Behind the sustained rise in stock price lies not only the positive impetus of the collaboration with Apple but also the increasing prominence of Chinese tech enterprises in the global AI industry chain, signifying profound shifts in the global tech competitive landscape.

Currently, as a representative of Chinese Internet tech stocks, Alibaba, after enduring a prolonged valuation downturn, is exhibiting signs of value reconstruction. It is evident that the pricing logic for Chinese tech assets in the market is undergoing drastic transformations.

Technological Ascendancy Fuels Value Reconstruction

Historically, the market's underestimation of Alibaba primarily stemmed from a systemic misjudgment of China's technological innovation capabilities in the global arena.

A recent Morgan Stanley report revealed that global investors often apply traditional internet thinking when valuing Chinese tech enterprises, failing to fully recognize Alibaba's significant breakthroughs in frontier technology fields.

Moreover, investors hold an overly simplistic view of Alibaba, perceiving it solely as an e-commerce enterprise, severely overlooking and underestimating its technological prowess in cloud computing and AI. In the current valuation system, Alibaba's business value in cloud computing and AI is virtually ignored, failing to receive due recognition.

Furthermore, persistent interference from non-fundamental factors such as geopolitics has exerted immense pressure on Alibaba's valuation, impeding the market from reflecting its true worth.

Recently, the emergence of DeepSeek, a domestic startup, has garnered global attention. Its open-source large model boasts performance close to international leading levels, with significantly reduced training and inference costs, rapidly narrowing the technological gap between China and the United States in AI.

DeepSeek has shattered conventional perceptions regarding the relationship between training costs and large model performance, offering fresh ideas and directions for AI technology development. It has garnered the attention of numerous enterprises and research institutions, propelling the exploration of AI technology applications across broader fields.

Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud officially released the Tongyi Qwen 2.5-Max model at the end of January, achieving groundbreaking progress in multiple core technical indicators. In the test conducted by the authoritative evaluation platform ChatBotArena, Tongyi Qwen 2.5-Max scored 1332 points, ranking seventh globally and first globally in individual tests of mathematics and programming capabilities.

In comparison, Alibaba Cloud and DeepSeek, which have opted for the open-source route, are leading the domestic 'large-scale, full-modal, multi-scenario' open-source 'force' to advance in tandem, successfully surpassing Llama to become the world's largest AI model family.

Although the AI giant OpenAI maintains technological barriers through a closed-source model, facing the impact of Chinese models, its stance has begun to shift, and it is anticipated to reformulate an open-source strategy in the future. Consequently, global AI open-source dominance is also transitioning from the United States to China.

It is evident that the success of DeepSeek and Alibaba's Tongyi Qwen 2.5-Max has gradually reversed market perceptions. Subsequently, the technology sectors of Hong Kong stocks and A-shares have exhibited robust momentum after the Spring Festival. The sustained rise in the stock prices of Chinese AI tech companies, led by Alibaba, has swiftly restored market confidence in Chinese tech stocks.

Hidden Currents of Competition: Horizontal and Vertical Integration via Differentiated Paths

Recently, Alibaba, spearheading China's AI industry, has brought much more than just these significant surprises to the market.

According to Hong Kong Stock Research, Apple has chosen Alibaba as its collaborator, and the two will jointly develop AI features for Chinese iPhone users. It is anticipated that Apple's AI will deeply integrate multiple functions of Alibaba's Tongyi large model to enhance capabilities such as photo search and text rewriting, improving the experience in scenarios like photography and text processing.

This is a highly indicative signal.

For Apple, regaining consumer favor through localized innovation is imminent. In the first quarter of 2025, Apple's sales in China decreased by 11.1% year-on-year, with revenue falling to $18.51 billion. Apple CEO Tim Cook also attributed part of the decline in market share to the fact that AI features have not yet been launched in China.

The decline in market share is also a cause for concern. The latest quarterly mobile phone tracker report released by IDC shows that Apple's market share in China's smartphone market fell to 15.6% in 2024, ranking third; vivo topped the list with a market share of 17.2%, an increase of 10.3% from the previous year; followed by Huawei with a market share of 16.6%, a significant increase of 50.1%.

For Alibaba, the ability to stand out this time is crucial, driven by its data and model capabilities. Beyond large model capabilities, Alibaba also possesses advantages in AI infrastructure such as deployment and computing power.

In contrast, DeepSeek, which has recently garnered much attention, frequently experiences 'server busyness,' indicating a clear shortage of computing power. In contrast, Alibaba has achieved a relative balance in multiple dimensions, including model capabilities, computing power, and data.

Collaborating with Apple will not only generate direct model licensing revenue but is also expected to bolster Alibaba Cloud's penetration into the developer ecosystem, continually enhancing the value of Alibaba Cloud.

Moreover, this marks the first time that Alibaba's AI technology has been deeply integrated into the global top-tier hardware ecosystem, poised to open up an intelligent terminal service market with an annual scale exceeding tens of billions. This will not only boost investors' confidence in Alibaba's technology monetization capabilities but also provide a new narrative for Apple's recovery in the Chinese market.

However, the deeper impact lies in the shift in valuation logic. Traditionally, Alibaba's valuation has been anchored on its e-commerce and cloud computing businesses. This collaboration proves that its AI technology now possesses 'exportable commercial value.'

The scale of the open-source ecosystem, cross-domain adaptability, and synergistic effects with super platforms have become crucial variables in the valuation model. This not only presents an opportunity for Alibaba to undergo value reconstruction but also offers a new paradigm for pricing the technological assets of global tech enterprises.

The Rise of a 'Third Option' in Sino-US Tech Cooperation and Competition

From a macro perspective, the intensifying tech race is compelling Chinese AI enterprises to 'collectively break through.'

Since 2024, Baidu's Wenxin large model and Huawei's Pangu large model have been successively implemented in the financial and manufacturing sectors; ByteDance's AI recommendation algorithm, trained on short video data, has penetrated overseas markets.

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With the collaboration between Alibaba and Apple, Chinese enterprises are beginning to leverage rich application scenarios and vast data resources, transitioning from single-point breakthroughs to ecosystem construction, forging a 'third path' in Sino-US tech cooperation and competition.

Unlike the past narrative of 'decoupling,' this 'cooperative competition model' may emerge as a new strategy for multinational tech companies to address multidimensional risks and may also compel other countries to reassess the effectiveness of technology blockade policies.

Furthermore, compared to the traditional 'technology export' model, in the collaboration between Alibaba and Apple, Alibaba gains more leverage in data sovereignty and intellectual property rights distribution. For instance, consumer behavior data from Taobao and Tmall will be deeply integrated with Apple's device ecosystem, forming a closed loop of 'user needs - data feedback - functional iteration.'

This model provides a template for other Chinese tech enterprises to participate in the global industrial chain, marking a shift from 'market for technology' to 'technology for market.'

In the long run, future cooperation under the 'third option' is also expected to further promote the decentralization of the global tech industrial chain. For instance, Apple's originally highly concentrated supply chain system (centered around TSMC and Foxconn) is beginning to extend to technological partners. As a software service provider, Alibaba may drive the upgrading of supporting industries such as Chinese AI chips and data services.

This 'hardware-software synergy' supply chain model may emerge as a new template for the digital transformation of global manufacturing.

If such collaborations become normalized, the traditional 'tech camps' divided by national or technical standards may dissolve, replaced by dynamic alliance networks based on technological complementarity. For example, European enterprises may follow Apple's example and choose to cooperate with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean enterprises to balance the influence of the United States and China. Consequently, the camp-like characteristics of global technology will dissipate.

From the regression of Alibaba's valuation to its collaboration with Apple, this signifies not only a response by global enterprises to the localized demand of the Chinese market but also a milestone in the transition of Sino-US tech enterprises from competition to complementarity. Its impact extends beyond the enterprise level, profoundly reflecting disruptive changes in the global AI race, supply chain reconstruction, and capital valuation logic.