Alibaba unveils Qwen3.7-Max and custom chips to become China's 'AI factory'

At the Alibaba Cloud Summit in Hangzhou, Liu Weiguang, the senior vice-president of Alibaba's cloud computing division, unveiled Qwen3.7-Max, the company's latest proprietary large language model, along with custom chips. This positions Alibaba as the leading 'AI factory' in China. Liu emphasized that AI represents a new manufacturing paradigm, generating revenue through 'training and inference factories.' He noted that Alibaba uniquely operates across 'all five layers of the full AI stack,' which includes chips, agentic cloud, AI models, model service platforms, and agentic applications. Qwen3.7-Max is engineered for AI agents, excelling in complex reasoning, agentic coding, and long-horizon tasks, capable of functioning autonomously for up to 35 hours without performance loss. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.