Analyst on Alibaba Group Holding (BABA) After New Model: China’s Catch-Up to US Will be ‘Rapid’

We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks on Wall Street’s Radar After DeepSeek Breakthrough. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) stands against other AI stocks on Wall Street’s radar after DeepSeek breakthrough.

AI investors are desperately trying to find clues on the real impact of DeepSeek on chip demand in the future and gauge how the breakthrough in China would impact US companies. Tae Kim, senior technology writer at Barron’s, said in a latest program on CNBC that DeepSeek has been able to significantly reduce the AI costs but that would increase more use cases of the technology:

“Over time, computing history has shown when you get more computing power and put that into the hands of developers, they figure out new applications, new workloads to use it. I mean, there’s that saying, “Oh, you only need 640k of memory,” and then obviously that proved false. So over time, like researchers, I mean, we have healthcare, drug discovery, trillions of proteins that need to be simulated, robotics. There are these three mega trends that are happening this year right now: multimodal, where you analyze audio and video, there’s AI agents, all these things are happening that are going to require more computing power.”

The question, however, everyone would be focusing on in the coming days is what if a hardware breakthrough happens in China and the country comes up with its own AI chips performing at par with its US counterparts.

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For this article, we picked 10 AI stocks currently trending on the latest news. With each stock, we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

Analyst on Alibaba Group Holding (BABA) After New Model: China’s Catch-Up to US Will be ‘Rapid’

An e-commerce platform displaying a wide range of products to customers online.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 115

Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) is trending on the back of the company’s new AI model and Citron Research’s bullish comments on the stock.

“Citron has been ahead of the curve on Alibaba Group and Qwen for the past six months,” the investment firm wrote in a post on X. “But what’s even more critical (and still overlooked) is Qwen’s enterprise applications. China lags the U.S. by decades in business software, and the catch-up will be rapid. This is bullish for China overall and strengthens the long China trade.”

Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE:BABA) Cloud’s Qwen team recently released a new family of AI models, Qwen2.5-VL, capable of performing a variety of text and image analysis tasks. The new Qwen2.5-VL range can parse files, analyze videos, count objects in images, and control computers, similar to OpenAI’s new Operator model.

Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE:BABA) published benchmark scores showing the Qwen 2.5 Max version of its large language model outperformed Meta Platforms’ (META) Llama and DeepSeek’s V3 model.

Conventum – Alluvium Global Fund stated the following regarding Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:

“On 24 September the People’s Bank of China unveiled a massive three part stimulus package involving: (1) slashing the amount of cash banks need to hold in reserve and lowering the main policy interest rate; (2) cutting mortgage rates on existing home loans by 0.5% and reducing down payment requirements for second homes from 25% to 15%; and (3) supporting equity markets by a USD 114b lending pool to encourage companies to buy back shares and non-bank financial institutions to buy local equities (which may be expanded by the same amount two more times)5 . We are flabbergasted. But we shouldn’t be. After all, these types of arrangements have been all too common over the last 15 years. The local equity markets responded with gusto, and for the last week of the quarter the CSI 300 Index (Shanghai and Shenzen listed companies) was up 25.1%. Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) was not lost in all this, and returned 26.8% over that one week period. But Alibaba had already performed well so during the whole September quarter it was up a staggering 56.0%. As a result, Alibaba is no longer the cheap stock it once was. It now trades at a premium to our valuation – a valuation which admittedly had been progressively reduced over our holding period as a result of deteriorating business fundamentals. As a result of Alibaba’s significant outperformance, by the end of the quarter it had reached 3.7% of the Fund. We are weighing up our options here, considering the relative risk.”

Overall, BABA ranks 6th on our list of AI stocks on Wall Street’s radar after DeepSeek breakthrough. While we acknowledge the potential of BABA, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than BABA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.