The goal is to get ahead of the competition
Alibaba Group has announced a plan to invest 3 billion yuan (≈ $431 million) to drive interest in its Qwen AI app during the Lunar New Year period, which in 2026 will run from February 15 for nine days, notes Investing.com. The amount is more than three times the reported budgets of its competitors: Tencent (1 billion yuan) and Baidu (500 million yuan). The campaign aims to attract the maximum number of users through various incentive bonuses, including “big red envelopes” for food, entertainment and leisure activities available through Alibaba’s ecosystem.
Why New Year’s Eve?
According to analysts, holiday periods are traditionally used by Chinese tech companies to build up their user base and strengthen their position in the consumer AI services market. As news.aibase.com notes, Alibaba’s investment in 2026 was the largest in terms of volume within the platform competition in the Chinese AI chatbot market.
“The company intends to not only attract new users, but also strengthen the interaction between Qwen AI and other services in the Alibaba ecosystem, including Taobao, Alipay and Fliggy,” Alibaba said in an official statement.
Short campaign for the long term
Although Alibaba’s marketing campaign is announced as a pre-holiday campaign, the giant’s strategic goals extend over a much longer period. The company’s strategy reflects the intensifying competition among major players in China’s AI market.
In this context, the record investment in promoting the Qwen AI app is perceived not only in terms of popularizing a specific corporate technology, but artificial intelligence in general, with its ever-expanding capabilities, as a consumer product. And Alibaba, of course, would like consumers to choose its AI products.
And the scale of the company’s investment demonstrates how important the end-user audience has become to the development of the AI ecosystem.
