Alibaba (BABA) announced a 3B yuan (~$431M) investment to promote its Qwen AI app during the Lunar New Year holidays. The campaign launches February 6, ahead of the public holiday starting February 15, offering rewards for dining, entertainment, and leisure via “large red envelopes.”
Alibaba (BABA) has not specified whether rewards are cash or platform discounts like on Taobao. The e-commerce giant (BABA) is also looking at launching Qwen 3.5—its new flagship AI model specifically optimized for complex reasoning tasks—during the same holiday period.
Alibaba’s (BABA) spending is almost triple the amount pledged by competitors and targets user acquisition through incentives. The Chinese tech firms battle over user acquisition during Lunar New Year, with companies like Tencent (TCEHY) (TCTZF) and Baidu (BIDU) (BAIDF) spending 1B yuan and 500M yuan, respectively, on similar promotions for their AI chatbots.
Besides, ByteDance (BDNCE) plans to release three new AI models next month—Doubao 2.0, a large language model for text generation; Seedream 5.0 for image creation; and SeedDance 2.0 for video synthesis. These tools integrate with platforms like Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese version), targeting consumer and enterprise use during high-traffic holiday periods.