Its founder Wang Xingxing had a coveted front-row seat at a summit with tech business leaders hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping early last year, and the start-up also has backing from some of China’s most influential tech firms including Tencent, Alibaba and DeepSeek.
DeepSeek currently charges less than a dollar per million input and output tokens, which is how AI services are sold to customers. By comparison, Anthropic's Fable 5 model charges $10 per million input and $50 per million output tokens.
Trustar Capital is nearing a deal to buy Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s video game unit, Lingxi Games, for more than US$1.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
JD.com reported second-quarter earnings of RMB6.29 per share, exceeding the analyst consensus of RMB5.63 by RMB0.66.
Revenue reached RMB346.4 billion, also coming in ahead of Wall Street expectations of RMB342.7 billion.
However, sales declined 2.9% compared with the second quarter of 2025. JD.com attributed the year-over-year contraction primarily to a challenging comparison with the strong revenue base established during the prior-year period.
On Monday, Alibaba Cloud disclosed that it has reduced the delivery time for large-scale AIDC (AI data center) facilities to 100 days through a fully modular design architecture.
In other words, a large data center that once could take nearly a year to build could now be delivered in roughly three months under Alibaba Cloud’s approach.
More importantly, the faster delivery has not come at the expense of higher construction costs. According to Alibaba Cloud, the overall construction cost of its data centers has also been reduced by more than 10% compared with the previous generation.
A flurry of model launches from China’s AI sector is rapidly narrowing the gap with Silicon Valley and creating what’s been described as a death zone for anyone without frontier-pushing technology or market-breaking pricing.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. became the latest in a parade of Chinese debuts hitting the top of global benchmarks with its Qwen3.8-Max this week, its most advanced model to date that appeared to match or exceed Anthropic PBC’s flagship Fable 5. Two weeks earlier, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 showed performance comparable to the priciest US options built on a much humbler budget, sparking fresh questions over the effectiveness of US chip sanctions intended to slow China’s tech ascent.
Sol is the only OpenAI model in top 10 Arena WebDev while 4 open-weight Chinese models have reached frontier quality; one of them so cheap you can run it for days for what Opus cost you per task.