Tencent Holdings Ltd. reported its strongest revenue growth in over three years for the first quarter of 2025, with sales rising 13% to ¥180 billion. The company's gross profit increased 20% to ¥100.5 billion, with a margin improvement of 324 basis points to 56%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 18% to ¥81.6 billion, and net income attributable to shareholders rose 22% to ¥61.3 billion. Tencent attributed these gains to its investments in artificial intelligence (AI), which have started to enhance performance in gaming and advertising. Similarly, Alibaba Group saw its revenue exceed $32 billion, driven by an 18% increase in Alibaba Cloud revenue to ¥30.1 billion ($4.2 billion) in the first quarter, boosted by AI-related product growth and a record level of AI workloads. Alibaba's AI initiatives include the launch of Qwen3, an open-source family of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models (LLMs) designed to improve expert-level reasoning, multilingual capabilities, and tool use. The Qwen3-32B model, running on Cerebras hardware, delivers real-time reasoning with a latency of 1.2 seconds and processes over 2,400 tokens per second. NetEase also reported a 35% increase in first-quarter net profit, driven by a rebound in popular Blizzard games and successful self-developed titles, which pushed gaming revenue to ¥23.4 billion, surpassing market expectations. Overall, Chinese internet giants like Tencent, Alibaba, and NetEase are experiencing rapid revenue growth fueled by AI integration, improved business environments, and increased consumer spending, especially through AI-powered advertising and cloud services.
I’ve been testing the new Qwen3 model from Alibaba Cloud. It’s open-source, multilingual, reasoning-capable — but I didn’t want to just read the specs. So I gave it real-world tasks. Not just “write me a poem” stuff. Actual work. Here’s what happened:🧵
How AI investments are paying off for Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent “AI capabilities already contributed tangibly to businesses, such as performance advertising and evergreen games,” No military surveillance or WMD support... https://t.co/kirgJUjbSK
Alibaba cements AI leadership as cloud unit reports fastest growth since 2022 https://t.co/1o9X7jTd6J