At the World Governments Summit 2025 held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Joseph Tsai, co-founder and chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Limited, responded to rumors of cooperation between Alibaba and Apple. He stated that Apple needs a localized partner in China for their mobile services. Apple has been very selective and has had discussions with several Chinese companies. In the end, they chose to do business with us. We are very fortunate and honored to be able to do business with such a great company like Apple.

On February 11th, The Information reported that Apple has chosen Alibaba Group Holding Limited as a partner to develop artificial intelligence features for the Chinese version of the iPhone. Sources said that as an e-commerce giant, Alibaba has more consumer data and its AI can better understand Chinese user requests based on personal data, leading Apple to ultimately choose it.

As one of the earliest tech companies to deploy large models, in April 2023, Alibaba released its first large language model called Thousand Questions with Universal Meanings and continues to open-source it. On January 29th, Alibaba‘s super-large-scale MoE model Qwen2.5-Max was officially launched and demonstrated performance comparable to DeepSeek V3, GPT-4 in multiple authoritative benchmark tests, even leading in some aspects.

SEE ALSO: The Chinese Mainland Apple Intelligence AI Feature Is About to Go Online