Artificial Intelligence Earthquake Rocks Alibaba and Tencent Thrones in China

 Shares of tech giants Alibaba and Tencent fell compared to the performance of the Chinese market in general, while Minimax, founded just five years ago, was valued at $40 billion last week, surpassing the market capitalization of social media giant, Baidu.

  The trio of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT)  are synonymous with China's  consumer internet, as they have successfully swept the markets of e-commerce, search, mobile payment, messaging, and other tech sectors, but are increasingly lagging behind in the field of artificial intelligence.

For example, ByteDance's Dupao is the country's most popular chatbot, and Knowledge Atlas Technology, a startup also known as Zibo, is virtually unknown outside of the People's Republic of China, now boasts the country's best large-scale language model, according to the independent think tank Artificial Analysis.

This was reflected in a wide divergence in market performance, with shares of AI labs Minimax and Zippo gaining more than 100% since their IPO in Hong Kong in January.

Bloomberg, citing sources, reported that private company Moonshot is planning a $1 billion funding round, which will raise its market capitalization to $18 billion, compared to just $4.3 billion last year.

On the other hand, shares of Alibaba and Tencent have fallen by 7% and 9%, respectively, this year, due to the slowdown in business.

Analysts estimate that Alibaba's main China merchandising unit will grow less than 5% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, accounting for 47% of total revenue, and Tencent's core divisions of video games, digital media and social media, saw sales rise by 13% over the same period.

But those numbers are dwarfed by the minimax's 159% sales jump in 2025, albeit from a much lower base.