Alibaba Falls 4% as Reported Beijing AI Probe Undercuts Chip Rally; Baidu Eases, JD.com Dips

Alibaba dropped 4% as Beijing's reported probe into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI attached regulatory risk to the AI model layer where Qwen competes.

Baidu eased 2% and JD.com fell 1%, both shallower declines than Alibaba's drop, confirming the sell-off targeted AI model and cloud exposure rather than Chinese tech broadly.

Alibaba's Apsara conference launched China's most powerful AI chips and a plan for a 20-gigawatt global data center network by 2032.

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Shares of Alibaba Group ( NYSE:BABA ) are falling in Wednesday morning trading, reversing part of the run the company's own Apsara conference announcements produced earlier this week. Alibaba stock is at $112.09, down 4%.

The KraneShares CSI China Internet ETF ( NYSEARCA:KWEB ) is down 2%. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust ( NYSEARCA:SPY ) is down 0.1%. Alibaba is leading the China internet complex lower rather than tracking a broader risk-off session.

Baidu ( NASDAQ:BIDU ) stock is at $90.26, down 2%, a shallower slide than Alibaba's. JD.com ( NASDAQ:JD ) stock is at $27.08, down 1%, the mildest move of the three. That skew points at selling aimed at model and cloud exposure rather than at Chinese technology broadly.

Reported Beijing Probe Undercuts a Chip Rally

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that shares of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) model developers fell after a report that China's regulators have opened a probe into the startups DeepSeek and Moonshot AI over data security concerns. The probe reportedly began after accusations from Anthropic that the two startups had been routing sensitive data through its Claude models. Alibaba, which develops the Qwen model, slid following the report.

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Leonid Mironov, a portfolio manager at Gavekal Capital, told Bloomberg that investors are afraid Beijing may heighten scrutiny of the industry, and that sentiment has weakened because the scope of regulation remains unclear and may risk slowing China's model development. That framing is what matters for Alibaba. The reported probe attaches regulatory risk to the model layer, which is exactly the part of this week's Apsara story the market had been paying up for.