Alibaba Group's U.S.-listed shares continued to climb after Chinese regulators officially approved Apple to launch its on-device artificial intelligence system in China. The long-awaited approval allows Apple to partner with Alibaba's Qwen large language model to deliver AI services in the world's largest smartphone market.

On Wednesday, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) added Apple's generative AI services to its latest list of approved AI service providers, placing Apple alongside major domestic technology companies such as Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi.

Alibaba confirmed that Qwen AI will be integrated across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS for users in China, enabling both text and image understanding and generation. Although Apple Intelligence was officially introduced in 2024, its rollout in China has faced significant regulatory hurdles.

During this process, Apple substantially redesigned its AI platform, replacing Google's Gemini model with Alibaba's Qwen as the underlying foundation and rebuilding the system to meet China's regulatory requirements.

With regulatory approval now secured, Apple can finally enter China's rapidly growing AI market, where demand for generative AI features continues to accelerate. The launch is expected to support Apple's efforts to revive its business in China as it seeks to narrow the gap with market leader Huawei. Neither Apple nor Alibaba has disclosed a specific timeline for when the AI features will become available to users following the approval.

Meanwhile, Alibaba has consolidated its AI portfolio under the unified Qwen brand while expanding AI integration across its own ecosystem, including Taobao, Tmall, and other digital platforms. The company also continues positioning Alibaba Cloud as the core infrastructure supporting China's AI development. Its partnership with Apple opens a major new distribution channel for Qwen beyond Alibaba's own products, giving the model access to hundreds of millions of iPhone users across China.

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Apple is also reportedly in early-stage discussions with PrismML, a California Institute of Technology spin-off backed by Khosla Ventures, regarding AI model compression technology. The technology could reduce the size of Alibaba's open-source Qwen 3.6 model from approximately 54 GB to under 4 GB, allowing the 27-billion-parameter model to run entirely on-device on an iPhone 15 or newer without relying on cloud processing.