Alibaba Unveils Roadmap on Full-Stack AI Strategy from Chips, Cloud Infrastructure, Models to Agents

• High- performance AI chips announced at Apsara Conference
• Next-generation Qwen 4 Model in training with future model's scale to 10 trillion parameters

HANGZHOU, CHINA - Media OutReach Newswire - 22 September 2026 - Alibaba today announced comprehensive updates with a roadmap for its full-stack AI strategy to fully unleash the value of AI at scale to customers through its latest innovations.

At this year's Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud's annual flagship technology conference, the technology innovator announced a series of updates featuring Qwen foundation models and multimodal models, new proprietary AI chips, a purpose-built agentic cloud, and an AI agent platform for mobile phones reinforcing Alibaba Cloud's leading global position in the new AI era.

"The theme of this year's Apsara Conference is 'Intelligence Goes Beyond'. Over the past few years, AI has continuously expanded our imagination of technological capabilities. AI possesses vast potential for development–it can be deployed and scaled in real-world scenarios, boosting productivity across thousands of industries," said Joe Tsai, Chairman of Alibaba Group. "This is the true meaning of 'Intelligence Goes Beyond': guiding AI from technological breakthroughs toward value creation."

"Today, the total volume of Machine Thinking is less than 3% of all Human Thinking. If that volume eventually scales to 1,000x human capacity, the simple math tells us: Machine Thinking still has an enormous growth runway. As machines are becoming the primary force behind Thinking, turning intelligence into a commodity supplied at scale, the truly groundbreaking products of the Machine Intelligence era have not yet arrived," said Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group. "With this in mind, our target is that by 2032, the global data center capacity operated by Alibaba Cloud will surpass 20GW, fueling the industry's exponentially rising demand for AI."

Qwen 4 in training

At the conference, Alibaba revealed that its next-generation model, Qwen 4, is currently in training. The company further announced its roadmap for the upcoming Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 model series, projected to scale up to 5 to 10 trillion parameters.

Alibaba has revealed progress in RSI (Recursive Self-Improvement) driven by empirical feedback. Over a month of fully automated runs - spanning pipeline design, data validation, iterative experimentation, and error diagnosis - Qwen3.8-Max completed 33 iterative cycles. Through autonomous training optimisation and post-training techniques, the updated Qwen3.8-Max boosted its Artificial Analysis score from 40 to 45.

In a chip design experiment, the model underwent over 60 hours of self-improvement across the entire design lifecycle, making more than 10,000 EDA tool calls to produce production-grade chip bus modules. This reduced chip area by 42% with zero compromise in performance.

Multimodal Model Family Upgrades

Alibaba introduced multimodal model updates spanning speech, audio, and vision.

The company debuted Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate, a simultaneous interpretation model that enhances translation fidelity, fluency, and brevity, reduces latency (LAAL) nearly 20% from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds for a smoother, more responsive real-time translation experience.

It also unveiled Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Next, a next-generation audio generation model capable of creating complete cinematic soundscapes by blending dialogue and ambient sounds all at once from a text script, designed for professional creative needs such as audiobooks, film and television, podcasts and games.

The updated speech suite also includes Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS (Text-to-Speech), and Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime, offering enhanced voice AI capabilities for understanding, generation, and real-time interaction.

Qwen-Image 3.1, an image-generation model optimized for creative design and e-commerce marketing, is set to launch later this year. It cuts visual design turnaround from hours to seconds while offering advanced generative tools, including native transparent-background generation and versatile image-editing capabilities.

To standardize world model evaluation, Alibaba Token Hub, alongside leading academic and industry partners, has introduced a six-tier capability framework and launched Happyworld Arena benchmarking platform, spanning video generation, embodied AI, and spatial reconstruction.

Bringing the models closer to general users, Alibaba has launched Qwen Intelligence, a business-facing full-stack agentic solution optimized for smartphones. It provides phone makers with access to a Qwen-powered agent platform to support next-generation AI phones that can handle complex, cross-app tasks reliably.

T-Head Unveils Zhenwu V900 and Yitian CPU Roadmap

T-Head, Alibaba's chip design unit, has unveiled the Zhenwu V900, its latest AI training and inference processor featuring high-capacity memory and robust inter-chip bandwidth.

The Zhenwu V900 delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890 (released in May). Featuring 216 GB of GPU memory and 1,200 GB/s of inter-chip bandwidth, the new accelerator is built to power demanding AI workloads with native support across multiple data precisions, including FP8 and FP4. By significantly reducing inference costs while increasing compute density, it seamlessly handles both high-precision model training and ultra-low-precision inference. It is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in Q1 2027.

T-Head's Zhenwu AI chips have been serving over 650 customers across different industries including automobile, finance, large language models, embodied intelligence, energy, and manufacturing.

Alibaba also unveiled its upgraded supernode server, which integrates the Zhenwu V900 processor, ICN Switch, Panmai SmartNIC, and Zhenyue SSD controller chip. Optimized for full-stack system-level synergy across compute, storage, and networking, the server can support a supernode cluster comprising up to 500,000 cards.

Additionally, Alibaba unveiled its roadmap for next-generation proprietary CPUs tailored for agentic AI tasks, scheduled for launch in 2027. The Yitian 720 features enhanced single-core performance, higher core density, and increased energy efficiency compared to its predecessor, the Yitian 710; The Yitian 730, the first CPU built on T-Head's proprietary microarchitecture, boasts up to a 40% increase in SPECint2017/GHz performance over Yitian 710's.

Agentic Cloud

Alibaba Cloud unveiled a comprehensive suite of upgrades centered on its agentic cloud strategy, built around three core scenarios — model, harness and context. The upgrades span three corresponding layers: AI Native Cloud for model, powering large-scale model training and inference; Agent Native Cloud for harness, enabling enterprise-grade agent deployment, operation and security; and Context Engine for context, providing real-time data and long-term memory, helping customers create real-world value with AI at scale.

AI Native Cloud

• Alibaba Cloud's Platform for AI (PAI) has integrated synergistic optimizations integrating inferencing, caching, sample replay and training services. In real-world post-training of Qwen models, PAI completed state-of-the-art model training in just five days, advancing from pre-training toward Agentic RL.
• Cloud Parallel File Storage (CPFS) system is a new-generation system optimized to better support AI model training, delivering hundred-terabyte-per-second throughput and hundred-million input/output operations per second (IOPS), helping cut enterprise AI storage costs by 69%.
• HPN 8.0 Pro, Alibaba Cloud's latest proprietary AI networking architecture, delivers 100 petabits bandwidth with ultra-low latency. A single cluster can support over 130,000 network ports at 800G speeds, with built-in redundancy ensuring that neither optical transceiver nor link failures cause service interruptions, while reducing the impact of network upgrades and failures from 50% to 25% compared to previous generation.

Agent Native Cloud

• AgentCore, is a new enterprise platform to build, run and manage AI agents throughout their entire lifecycle. It enables businesses to easily build and run their AI tools, safely control human-agent collaboration, and monitor performance for continuous improvements. With enterprise-grade security embedded at the operating layer, AgentCore provides organizations with a single, controlled foundation to deploy diverse AI agents and seamlessly integrate them into critical business systems at scale.
• The Agent Security Center delivers full-lifecycle security and compliance management for enterprise AI agent applications. The platform provides a multi-layered defense system powered by real-time threat detection, ensuring agents operate securely within controllable boundaries at scale.

Context Engine

• Agent Context is an enterprise-grade context data service that gives AI agents real-time context and long-term memory. By connecting a company's documents, business systems, chat records and multimodal data into a single foundation, it enables agents to remember past tasks, share knowledge across teams, and learn continuously. In knowledge-intensive scenarios such as customer service, AI coding and data analytics, it cuts token usage by up to 67%.
• OpenLake has been upgraded into a unified, multi-modality data lakehouse, where a single copy of data—structured, semi-structured, unstructured, vector, and streaming formats—serves multiple compute engines for processing, search, analysis, and model training. Compared with traditional architectures, OpenLake reduces total costs by 38% and cuts query response times by 40%.

Hashtag: #Alibaba

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About Alibaba Group

Alibaba Group is a global technology company focused on AI + Cloud and commerce. We empower consumers and enterprises with our full-stack AI capabilities and services, from applications to compute infrastructure. Our AI technology based on the Qwen family of large language and multimodal models powers the intelligence behind our services across enterprise solutions and consumer platforms. Our commerce business puts consumers first and provides the technology and marketing reach to help merchants, brands, retailers and small businesses to engage with customers and operate efficiently.

** This press release is distributed by Media OutReach Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

Hong Kong Daily Mood Index Stands at 54.5; Over 80% of Respondents Report a Positive Impact of Fragrance on Mood

HONG KONG SAR - Media OutReach Newswire - 11 November 2026 - Eternal Beauty Holdings Limited (the "Group"; Stock Code: 6883.HK) today released "Scent, Emotion and Lifestyle: 2026 Hong Kong Daily Mood Index and Fragrance Trends White Paper" (the "White Paper") at the 29th edition of Cosmoprof Asia. An online survey conducted by Eternal Beauty Holdings in September recorded a Hong Kong Daily Mood Index of 54.5, with respondents scoring relatively higher on positive mood and lower on energy and rest. Over 80% of respondents reported that fragrance had a positive impact on their everyday mood. Alongside the launch, the Group presented its "Scent of Happiness" campaign, exploring the connections between fragrance, self-care and emotional well-being through the Scent & Mood Relax Hub and a panel discussion. Through initiatives delivered in partnership with its collaborators, the Group also supports emotional well-being and extends its commitment to care into the community.

Eternal Beauty Holdings Releases the "2026 Hong Kong Daily Mood Index and Fragrance Trends White Paper"

The panel featured speakers from diverse fields, including Ms. Laurinda Ho, Founder of Smile With Us HK; Mr. William Lam, Clinical Advisor to the Mind HK Tai Po Mental Health Support Programme; and Mr. Chris Chu, CRM & Partnership Manager at Eternal Group. Moderated by Mr. Matt Chung, Curator and Cultural Commentator, the discussion explored different perspectives on fragrance's role in daily life and offered practical self-care advice. The report also provides practical guidance for local retailers and fragrance brand owners on integrating scent and technology into retail spaces to enhance the customer experience, reflecting Eternal Group's commitment to building and leading the fragrance industry ecosystem.

Community initiatives under the "Scent of Happiness" campaign include three community events co-organised with Smile With Us HK for children, families and older adults; sponsorship of 80 sessions of iACT mental health support provided by Mind HK; and three relaxation and sensory sessions featuring neuroVIZR's synchronised light-and-sound experience. Through these initiatives, the Group supports emotional well-being in the community, demonstrating its commitment to corporate social responsibility.

Ms. Wendy Lau, Executive Director of Eternal Beauty Holdings Limited, said in her opening remarks: "Fragrance is more than a sensory experience—it expresses how we choose to live. Three years of White Paper research have shown that fragrance has become part of Hong Kong consumers' daily routines. As a leader in the fragrance industry, we combine consumer insights, innovative technology and community partnerships through our 'Scent of Happiness' campaign, translating our commitment to self-care and emotional well-being into concrete action and creating long-term value for the industry and society."

Positive Mood Scores Highest, While Rest and Vitality Are Relatively Lower
The survey explored respondents' positive feelings and experiences over the preceding two weeks using five indicators, each scored out of 100. "Cheerful and in good spirits" scored highest at 58.4, followed by "Calm and relaxed" at 55.9 and "Everyday life is interesting or fulfilling" at 55.2. Scores for "Active and energetic" and "Refreshed and well rested" were relatively lower, at 52.7 and 50.4 respectively.

The eight-point gap between "Cheerful and in good spirits" and "Refreshed and well rested" was the largest among the five indicators, suggesting stronger positive emotional experiences relative to rest and energy levels.

Over 80% Report a Positive Impact of Fragrance on Mood; Usage Frequency Is Associated with the Daily Mood Index
The survey found that 81.3% of respondents reported a positive impact of fragrance on their everyday mood: 28.4% reported a very positive influence and 52.9% a slightly positive influence.

In terms of usage frequency, 71.7% of respondents used fragrance several times a week or more, while 46.5% used it almost every day. Frequent users recorded a Daily Mood Index of 55.8, compared with 51.1 among other respondents—a 4.7-point difference indicating an association between fragrance usage frequency and the Daily Mood Index.

By demographic group, frequent-use rates were 73.9% among women and 62.5% among men. Rates exceeded 70% across all age groups from 25 to 54, reaching 76.1% among those aged 45–54. Among respondents with a personal monthly income of HK$30,001–40,000, the frequent-use rate reached 83.6%.
Note: "Frequent use" refers to using fragrance several times a week or more.

"Scent, Emotion and Lifestyle: 2026 Hong Kong Daily Mood Index and Fragrance Trends White Paper" is based on an online survey of 433 Hong Kong consumers conducted in September 2026. Its six key findings are outlined below. The full White Paper is available here.

1. Fragrance is part of daily life, with over seven in ten using it several times a week or more
94.2% of respondents reported using fragrance products. Among those who answered the usage-frequency question, 71.7% used fragrance several times a week or more, classified as frequent users; 46.5% used it almost every day.

2. The Daily Mood Index stands at 54.5
The 2026 Hong Kong Daily Mood Index recorded 54.5 out of 100. "Feeling cheerful and in good spirits" scored 58.4, compared with 50.4 for "feeling fresh and rested"—an eight-point gap reflecting generally insufficient rest among respondents despite positive emotional experiences.

3. Over 80% Report a Positive Impact of Fragrance on Mood
81.3% of respondents felt that fragrance positively influenced their everyday mood, including 28.4% who reported a very positive influence.

4. Frequent fragrance users record a higher Daily Mood Index
Frequent fragrance users recorded a Daily Mood Index of 55.8, compared with 51.1 among other respondents—a 4.7-point difference indicating an association between frequent fragrance use and a higher Daily Mood Index.

5. Frequent fragrance use extends beyond younger generations
Frequent-use rates exceeded 70% across all age groups from 25 to 54, reaching 76.1% among those aged 45–54, indicating that regular fragrance use spans different adult age groups.

6. Fragrance use goes beyond enjoying a pleasant scent
55.0% of respondents cited "helping them relax" as a reason for using fragrance, while 52.5% selected "lifting their mood", highlighting fragrance's emotional value beyond scent preferences.

Panel Discussion Explores Scent, Self-Care and Emotional Wellness
Following the White Paper launch, the Group hosted "Scent, Self-Care and Emotional Wellness", a panel discussion at CosmoTalks at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Building on the White Paper's exploration of fragrance and everyday mood, the discussion moved from survey findings to practical approaches to supporting emotional well-being in daily life. Laurinda Ho, Founder of Smile With Us HK, said, "At Smile With Us HK, we hope to bring positive energy to the wider community through activities organised in partnership with Eternal Group." Mr. William Lam, Clinical Advisor for the Tai Po Mental Health Support Project at Mind HK, said, "Self-care is an important part of maintaining good mental health. Enjoying a fragrance that brings you pleasure and evokes happy memories can be a simple starting point for self-care."

Scent & Mood Relax Hub: A Sensory Experience Bringing Together Fragrance and Technology (Booth: 5G-G3G)

The Group also introduced the Scent & Mood Relax Hub, featuring perfumes and home fragrances from its portfolio of international and niche brands. Combining fragrance with neuroVIZR's synchronised light and sound experiences, the Hub offers an immersive sensory journey centred on four themes: "Relax", "Focus", "Better Sleep" and "Creativity".

Looking ahead, Eternal Group will remain committed to the art of living, drawing on consumer insights and the strengths of its international and niche brand portfolio. Through a diverse range of products, including perfumes and home fragrances, the Group will respond to consumers' fragrance and everyday self-care needs. It will also integrate innovative technology to enhance fragrance experiences, broaden fragrance use across lifestyle settings and capitalise on market opportunities. Through its ongoing "Scent of Happiness" campaign, the Group will deepen cross-sector partnerships and bring the art of living into community care, creating long-term value for consumers, partners and the community.

Hashtag: #EternalGroup

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About Eternal Beauty Holdings Limited (Stock Code: 6883.HK)

Eternal Beauty Holdings Limited is the largest perfume group (apart from brand-owner perfume groups) in China (including Hong Kong and Macao) in terms of retail sales in 2023*. It primarily sells and distributes products procured from third-party brand licensors, and deploys market for these brand licensors, offering such services as brand management, and designing and implementing customized market entry and expansion plans for their brands. The Group boasts large and diversified brand portfolios that include not only perfumes, but also color cosmetics, skincare products, personal care products, eyewear and home fragrances. As at 30 September 2026, it conducted product distribution and market deployment for a total of 82 external brands, including Hermès, Van Cleef & Arpels, Chopard, Albion and Laura Mercier, with products in different pricing tiers and of versatile features that meet the differentiated demands of consumers in Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and/or Macao. (*Data source: Frost & Sullivan)

** This press release is distributed by Media OutReach Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **