Alibaba Group Stock Rises After It Denies Reports About Investing In DeepSeek: Retail’s Bullish

ADR shares of Alibaba Group Holding ($BABA) rose more than 3% on Friday after the retail and tech giant denied reports it was seeking an investment in AI company DeepSeek, with retail sentiment staying optimistic.

"We applaud DeepSeek as a fellow company in Hangzhou, but news circulating that Alibaba will invest in DeepSeek is fake,” Yan Qiao, a vice-president at Alibaba, reportedly said.

According to a WeChat post from the company executive, Alibaba’s cloud computing and AI unit has six new DeepSeek models that are available through its large language model (LLM) service platform Bailian, reported The South China Morning Post, which noted the share price of Alibabq gained 5.5% in Hong Kong on Monday.

Sentiment on Stocktwits was ‘bullish’ compared to ‘extremely bullish’ a week ago. Message volumes were in the ‘high’ territory compared to ‘extremely high.’

Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max's API will be rolled out under its cloud business unit that has made several strides in AI in the past year.

Recently, Alibaba said its latest artificial intelligence model, Qwen2.5-Max, performed better on many fronts compared to top-tier AI models including DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o. Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Max is a large-scale Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) model that it claims can achieve competitive performance against the top-tier models.

Qwen2.5-Max surpassed DeepSeek V3 in several benchmarks and performed significnatly better on many fronts that are critical for further advances in the area of AI and machine learning.

Alibaba ADR shares are up 22% year-to-date.

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