China’s AI arms race sees sector brace for major flagship model launch week

South China Morning PostCenter-RightEN 2 min read 100% complete by Vincent ChowFebruary 9, 2026 at 01:02 PM

AI Summary

medium article 2 min

China's AI sector is anticipating a week of major model releases from domestic tech companies, intensifying the global AI competition. Alibaba Cloud is preparing to launch its flagship Qwen-3.5 model family, almost a year after the release of Qwen-3, which became a popular open-source model. The Qwen-3.5 family will include two models with 9 billion and 35 billion parameters, respectively, and will feature native multimodal support for the first time. This launch comes amid a rapid acceleration of AI progress globally, following releases from US companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as companies compete for user attention. The release is timed ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.

Key Entities & Roles

Key Player Opposition Context

Hangzhou 30% South China Morning Post 40% Hugging Face 40% GitHub 40% OpenAI 50% Anthropic 50% Qwen-3 60% Lunar New Year 60% Alibaba Group Holding 60% Qwen-3.5 ×270% Alibaba Cloud ×280% China 90%

Keywords

artificial intelligence 100% ai models 90% china 80% flagship model 70% qwen-3.5 70% alibaba cloud 60% multimodal support 50% open-source 50% model parameters 40%