Apple Intelligence approved for launch in China with Alibaba’s Qwen AI
TechCrunch Sarah Perez ● Covered by 2 sources
Apple Intelligence just got the green light in China, and it's running on Alibaba's Qwen model, not Apple's own tech. Took over a year and several failed talks with Baidu, DeepSeek and ByteDance to get here.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
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Apple finally has a path into China's AI market, and it runs through Alibaba. China's Cyberspace Administration signed off on Apple Intelligence this week, clearing the way for Qwen, Alibaba's large language model, to power the generative features across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS for Chinese users.
This wasn't a quick handshake. Apple reportedly spent months chasing a different partner first, trying to get Baidu's models to work smoothly for Chinese customers before that effort stalled out. DeepSeek and ByteDance were also floated as possibilities, according to earlier reporting, but none of those talks produced a deal Apple was willing to ship. The result: Apple Intelligence, which launched globally back in 2024, has been sitting on the sidelines in China for well over a year while Apple sorted out who it wanted in the room.
The timing matters more than it might look. Apple's Greater China revenue jumped 28% last quarter to $20.5 billion, and the company just clawed its way back to the No. 2 spot in Chinese smartphone sales after a shopping-festival discount push. Landing a working AI partnership now gives Apple something to point to as it tries to keep that momentum going against local rivals who've had AI features baked into their phones for a while.
Alibaba, for its part, kept things vague. A spokesperson told CNBC that Qwen would be woven into Apple Intelligence for things like text and image understanding and generation, but wouldn't say when any of it actually ships to phones. Markets didn't wait for details, though — Alibaba's US-listed shares jumped 4% premarket and were up more than 6% by the time this was published, which tells you how much investors have been waiting for exactly this kind of validation.
What's notable is what Apple gave up to get here. Handing the AI experience for over a billion potential users to a Chinese competitor's model, rather than Apple's own, is a pretty stark admission that going it alone in China wasn't working. It's also a preview of a pattern Apple may need to repeat elsewhere: local rules, local partners, local models.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Apple outsourcing its AI brain to Alibaba in China isn't a partnership of equals, it's a permission slip, and everyone should call it that. Big Tech loves to talk about unified global platforms, but China just proved that story was always fiction — data laws and local champions win, every time. If you're tracking sovereignty over AI infrastructure, this is the clearest sign yet that the 'one model to rule them all' fantasy is dead, and the EU should be taking notes rather than dragging its feet on its own AI Act rollout.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch