Alibaba Stock Hits Fresh 52-Week High After Report Of Nvidia Collaboration: Retail Turns ‘Extremely Bullish’

U.S.-listed shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA) rose nearly 2% on Monday, hitting a 52-week high of $91.15 that lifted retail sentiment.

Retail sentiment has shifted dramatically, turning ‘extremely bullish’ (78/100) on Stocktwits , up from ‘neutral’ just a day prior.

Enthusiasm seems to be driven by Alibaba’s growing advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and its partnership with semiconductor giant Nvidia.

Over the weekend, the South China Morning Post reported that Alibaba’s cloud computing arm is working with Nvidia to develop AI solutions aimed at improving autonomous driving for Chinese automakers.

Alibaba’s Qwen portfolio of large language models (LLMs), including Qwen2-7B and Qwen2-VL, is now integrated with Nvidia’s Drive AGX Orin platform, which powers autonomous vehicle technology for companies like Li Auto, Great Wall Motors, and Xiaomi.

In a bid to stay competitive in the global AI race, Alibaba also released over 100 new open-source AI models and text-to-video tools last week.

Since the launch of its Qwen models in April 2023, the technology has been downloaded more than 40 million times, bolstering Alibaba’s AI presence against rivals like Baidu and U.S. firms such as Microsoft and OpenAI.

Alibaba’s growth has been hampered by several challenges, including a slowing Chinese economy, intensifying competition from upstarts like Pinduoduo and ByteDance’s Douyin, and subdued consumer sentiment.

However, the company’s return of over 20% this year, roughly in line with broader market gains, shows that investor confidence hasn’t been impacted much.

Although BABA shares are trading at their 2024 peak currently, they are still far from their all-time high of $319 set in October 2020.

Co-founder Jack Ma, on the occasion of the company’s 25th anniversary earlier this month, reportedly emphasized in an internal memo that competition would ultimately strengthen Alibaba, reinforcing the importance of market innovation.

With its strong retail backing and renewed AI initiatives, Alibaba appears to be charting a new course for growth in 2024. However, lingering challenges remain as it competes on both the domestic and global stage.

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