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BABA-W (09988.HK) held its 2026 Apsara Conference, with the first morning session demonstrating accelerating AI development momentum across chips, cloud, foundation models and multimodal applications, reinforcing the group's strategy of building a vertically integrated AI ecosystem for the agent era, Citi said in a report. The broker maintained Buy on Alibaba Group Holding Limited (BABA.US) with a TP of USD190.

The report cited management disclosures at the afternoon MaaS and Agent Forum that MaaS's ARR reached RMB20 billion in September, compared with RMB16 billion in August and RMB8 billion in May. Although management did not provide revised year-end targets, the broker believed Alibaba is highly likely to exceed its existing RMB30 billion ARR target before year-end based on the current growth trajectory.

T-Head launched the Zhenwu V900, strengthening its push into the inference-centric AI era, where multi-step orchestration and system-level co-design are becoming increasingly critical. Alibaba Cloud's Lingjun Super Node GP9A, powered by the current-generation Zhenwu M890, has already entered service and is claimed to be China's first AI super node capable of supporting models with more than 2T parameters, including Qwen 3.8-Max and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.
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Gregory Yu, Managing Director and Head of Markets at HKEX (00388.HK), said RMB-denominated gold futures contracts settled in Hong Kong are expected to be launched in early next year. More RMB-denominated commodity investment products such as precious metals will continue to be introduced in the future.

He added that open interest in the five-year government bond futures launched in August this year increased from about 900 contracts in the first week after launch to nearly 3,000 contracts currently, attracting market participants from the Middle East, Europe, the US and SE Asia. He believed this is a direction worth developing.
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Alibaba Cloud, under BABA-W (09988.HK), held its flagship Apsara Conference this week, BofA Securities said in a research report. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu reiterated the company's long-term commitment to AI, emphasizing continued investment in AI models, chips and cloud infrastructure as AI advances toward machine intelligence.

The broker observed strong and rapidly accelerating customer demand, whereas the company has a clear strategic commitment to AI agents and continues to develop a Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) architecture, while demonstrating increasingly autonomous and self-reinforcing full-stack capabilities across infrastructure, models, platforms and applications.

The conference reinforced the broker's positive view on Alibaba, as its industry-leading full-stack AI ecosystem enables it to capture value across multiple layers of the AI stack. The cloud business supports near-term monetization and AI services, while applications and international expansion underpin longer-term growth. The next potential catalyst will be the fiscal 2Q update for the period ended late September, expected before the October blackout period.

BofA Securities said Alibaba plans to operate more than 20 gigawatts of global data center capacity by 2032, highlighting management's confidence that medium- to long-term AI computing demand will significantly exceed current supply. This implies annual additions of around 2 gigawatts on average. The broker estimated construction costs at approximately USD30-35 billion per gigawatt, but expected a substantial portion to be financed through leasing and other partnership arrangements, limiting Alibaba's direct capex burden.

Therefore, it maintained its FY2027-FY2028 capex forecasts at RMB230-250 billion. The 20-gigawatt target is broadly consistent with management guidance for USD100 billion in external AI and cloud revenue by FY2031 (around calendar year 2030). The broker maintained its Buy rating on Alibaba. It set a USD175 target price for Alibaba Group Holding Limited (BABA.US) ADRs and an HKD172 target price for H shares.
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