Alibaba up 2% in pre-market after launch of AI model on par with DeepSeek’s R1

Shares of Alibaba (BABA) are up 2% in pre-market around $144, following yesterday’s 9% gain in the stock price. Reuters reports that the company’s release of an AI reasoning model, said to be on par with DeepSeek’s R1, are driving shares higher. The report also cites Alibaba AI unit exec indicating that its QwQ-32B, with 32 billion parameters, can achieve performance comparable to DeepSeek’s R1 model that has 671 billion parameters. In turn, shares of Nvidia (NVDA) are down 3% and those of Broadcom (AVGO) are down 4% in pre-market trading.