Alibaba rolls out Qwen-3.5, ratcheting up the global AI race

Alibaba Cloud has unveiled its next-generation open artificial intelligence model, Qwen-3.5, in a move set to have major implications for the global AI race between China and the US.

The much-anticipated release, timed on the eve of the Lunar New Year, capped a frenetic week in which nearly every major Chinese AI developer rolled out new flagship models.

The two new 3.5-series models were made available first on Alibaba’s flagship consumer AI app Qwen on Monday afternoon, with an official announcement expected soon after.

Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.

According to Alibaba’s cloud platform Model Studio, Qwen-3.5 Plus achieved performance “on par with state-of-the-art leading models” and has a listed context window – the amount of data it can process at any given time – of 1 million tokens, one of the largest in the industry.

Meanwhile, a version called Qwen-3.5-Open-Source was also made available, with a listed parameter count of 397 billion parameters and a 256,000-token context window.