Alibaba stock pops nearly 10% as Qwen AI tops 700 million Hugging Face downloads
NEW YORK, Jan 12, 2026, 11:08 EST Shares of Alibaba Group Holding (BABA.N) jumped nearly 9.8% to $165.68 in late morning trading Monday. The surge followed news that its Qwen open-source AI models surpassed 700 million downloads on Hugging Face, a platform where developers exchange and refine models. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BABA/ The number of downloads stands out as one of the rare public indicators investors can latch onto in the AI battle. This comes as Alibaba pushes to persuade markets that cloud computing and AI will drive a bigger share of its growth. Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen family topped 700 million downloads on