Alibaba Chair Confirms Apple AI Partnership in China

A top executive from China’s Alibaba has confirmed his company’s AI partnership with Apple.

Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s chair, said at a conference in Dubai Thursday (Feb. 13) that the tech firm would work with Apple to help bring artificial intelligence (AI)-powered iPhones to China. His comments followed reports earlier this week about a collaboration between the companies.

“Apple has been very selective,” said Tsai, whose comments were reported by the Financial Times (FT). “They talked to a number of companies in China and in the end they chose to do business with us.”

“They want to use our AI to power their phones, so we’re very fortunate and extremely honored to be able to do business with a great company like Apple,” the executive added.

Apple rolled out its AI offering — dubbed “Apple Intelligence” — last year after introducing the latest version of its flagship smartphone.

However, the company has had trouble bringing its AI capabilities to China, which requires large language models to undergo strict testing and receive regulatory approvals. Apple has been looking for a China-based partner to help it through that process.

A report earlier this week from The Information said Apple has since 2023 been testing various AI models from a host of Chinese developers, including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and Baidu. The latter company briefly formed a partnership with Apple, that report said, but that arrangement ended after Baidu’s efforts fell short of Apple’s standards.

Apple also considered but eventually passed on AI startup DeepSeek, as that company’s team couldn’t provide the manpower or expertise to support a company of Apple’s size, the report added.

The partnership comes as Apple is struggling in China. The company’s sales there fell 11.1% during the latest quarter to $18.51 billion, the largest downturn in revenues in that country since the same quarter in 2024, when they slipped 12.9%.

“We did see that the markets where we had rolled out Apple Intelligence, that the year-over-year performance on the iPhone 16 family was stronger than those where Apple Intelligence was not available,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts during an earnings call.

According to the FT, Tsai said that Apple could undertake AI partnerships with other companies outside China, “but inside China, because of regulatory issues and things like that, they need to work with Chinese companies that develop AI.”

“I think that is going to be the case wherever you do business in the future; you may want to have a localized AI that powers your devices,” he said.

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