New York, Feb 26, 2026, 05:53 EST — Premarket
- Alibaba shares trading in the U.S. slipped roughly 3% ahead of the regular opening bell.
- Its cloud arm is launching budget-friendly access to several Chinese AI coding models.
- Eyes are on pricing trends, appetite for cloud services, and how much is actually going toward AI before the next results hit.
Alibaba Group Holding shares dropped 3.1% to $147.58 in U.S. premarket trade Thursday, ahead of the regular session. (Investing)
Alibaba’s stock drop is significant: the company is betting hard on AI to drive cloud sales, and it’s now signaling it’ll undercut rivals on price to lure developers. The move could ramp up usage quickly, but there’s a risk it squeezes margins.
This comes as so-called AI “coding assistants”—software tools designed to aid with writing and editing code—are already pushing sector stocks around. Investors are now watching closely for clearer signals on whether the dollars funneled into models and compute are generating returns.
Alibaba’s cloud division is ramping up efforts in coding platforms, rolling out discounted access to some of China’s leading AI models with an option for users to toggle between them, Bloomberg reported. The entry-level tier is priced at 7.9 yuan for the first month, with the premium version set at 39.9 yuan initially. After that, monthly fees jump to 40 yuan and 200 yuan, respectively, according to the report. (The Star)
Alibaba Cloud’s “Coding Plan” lays out a fixed monthly price for as many as 90,000 requests, with access to models like Qwen3.5-Plus, GLM-5, and Kimi-k2.5. The package works with developer tools including Qwen Code, Claude Code, Cline, and OpenClaw. (AlibabaCloud)
This isn’t only a matter of tools—it’s also a question of which players can hold on to users after the promotions end.
ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot surged past 100 million daily active users over the Lunar New Year, numbers from AICPB.com show. Alibaba’s Qwen, by comparison, hit a high of 30 million before settling at 22 million. Daily active users tracks how many actually use an app each day. Still, AICPB noted, “Qwen, however, showed the strongest retention.” (Reuters)
On the infrastructure front, chip maneuvering remains part of the landscape. DeepSeek withheld its soon-to-launch flagship model from Nvidia and AMD in the run-up to a key update, according to two people with knowledge of the situation who spoke to Reuters. “New AI coding tools are reducing the time it takes” to optimise software for hardware “from months to weeks,” said Ben Bajarin, CEO at Creative Strategies. (Reuters)
Alibaba shares fell 0.5% to finish at $152.31 on Wednesday, slipping to about $147.48 in after-hours moves before the bell, MarketBeat data showed. Analysts tracked by MarketBeat have consensus earnings pegged at $1.91 per share for the quarter, with revenue forecasts at $40.95 billion. (MarketBeat)
Still, the downside risk is hardly new. A price war across AI services and developer tools might push volumes up, but profit margins could get squeezed, particularly if cloud buyers hesitate to ramp up spending. With rivals all fighting for mindshare, subsidies might have to stick around.
Up ahead: Alibaba is set to release its December-quarter earnings, with Nasdaq’s calendar marking Feb. 26 as the date for results covering the period through December 2025. Guidance around cloud expansion, AI spending, and pricing strategy will be under the microscope. (Nasdaq)
