Alibaba Takes Aim at Rivals With Qwen3 Max at 1 Trillion Parameters

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3. Alibaba Takes Aim at Rivals With Qwen3 Max at 1 Trillion Parameters

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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is rolling out Qwen3-Max, a 1-trillion-parameter AI model it says can take on today’s front-runners, Chinese state media reported.

Qwen3-Max is the first model in Alibaba’s Qwen series of AI models that surpasses one trillion parameters and was pretrained on 36 trillion tokens.

The model is touted to improve accuracy in math, coding, logic and other STEM tasks, and to follow instructions better in English and Chinese.

“The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,” said Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, in the press conference.

While Wu said the company was looking to further its spending in AI, he did not specify the amount.

Qwen3-Max vs others

The Alibaba model is set to compete with established players such as OpenAI’s GPT-5, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude’s Opus 4, among others.

Alibaba said the model outperformed its competitors, including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in certain metrics, citing third-party benchmarks, such as Tau2-Bench.

The exact parameter counts for competing models have not been officially confirmed. AI researchers, industry insiders, and leaked reports speculate that GPT-4 has approximately 1.76 to 1.8 trillion parameters, and Claude 3 Opus has approximately 175 billion. Meanwhile, Perplexity leverages a combination of proprietary models, the OpenAI (GPT), and Anthropic (Claude) models, and also integrates third-party models.

There is no data available on Google Gemini.

Alibaba’s AI Bet

Following investments in Intel and OpenAI, Nvidia has struck a partnership with Alibaba. The Jack Ma-founded company will integrate Nvidia’s AI development tools for robotics, self-driving cars, and connected spaces into its Cloud Platform.

This further enhances Alibaba’s repositioning, shifting its focus from an e-commerce platform to AI. Data from Pitchbook reveals that Alibaba participated in deals worth over $3.3 billion in the past three years.  

The Chinese entity made AI an equal priority to its traditional e-commerce operations. Earlier this year, it announced plans to invest $53.40 billion (380 billion yuan) in AI-related infrastructure in the next three years. ​

In January, Alibaba released Qwen 2.5-Max, aiming to pressure domestic rival player Deepseek.

The company, besides unveiling Qwen3-Max, has also introduced Qwen3-Omni—a multimodal, immersive AI system designed for applications in virtual and augmented reality, such as smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.