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Alibaba’s Amap Hits Record 360 Million Users on First Day of China’s Extended Holiday

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Alibaba Group’s mapping app Amap reached an all-time record of over 360 million daily active users on the first day of China’s eight-day National Day holiday, the company announced on Wednesday.

The surge highlights Amap’s growing dominance in the travel and lifestyle app ecosystem and marks a significant milestone in its ongoing rivalry with Meituan, another major player in China’s digital services market.

AMAP’S STRATEGIC SHIFT AND AI FEATURES

Traditionally known for navigation, Amap has been expanding into lifestyle and local services, directly challenging Meituan’s Dazhong Dianping platform. It now offers AI-powered rankings of restaurants, hotels and tourist destinations through its new feature called “Street Stars”, which leverages artificial intelligence algorithms to generate destination lists for users.

As part of the launch campaign, Amap rolled out 1 billion yuan ($140.43 million) worth of subsidies, including ride-hailing discounts and in-store coupons, to boost engagement during the peak holiday period.

MARKET REACTION AND HOLIDAY BOOST

The announcement sent Alibaba’s shares up 4% in Hong Kong trading on Thursday after JPMorgan raised its price target on the stock to HK$240 ($30.85) from HK$165, citing stronger-than-expected user activity and positive outlooks in the company’s digital services ecosystem.

The record usage coincided with China’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival, which this year were combined into an eight-day “super holiday”, one of the country’s busiest travel periods.

According to state broadcaster CCTV, China’s national railway handled 23.13 million passenger trips on the first day alone — an 8% increase year-on-year and a new single-day record, underscoring the nationwide travel boom.

ALIBABA VS. MEITUAN: A DIGITAL LIFESTYLE BATTLE

Amap’s evolution reflects Alibaba’s broader effort to capture local-lifestyle market share from Meituan by transforming a simple mapping tool into a comprehensive travel and experience platform.
Chinese consumers, who traditionally turned to Meituan’s Dazhong Dianping for restaurant reviews and bookings, are increasingly finding similar services integrated directly within Amap’s app — backed by AI personalization and user subsidies.

As China’s consumer and tourism sectors rebound post-pandemic, the battle for digital lifestyle dominance between Alibaba and Meituan is set to intensify — with Amap’s record user engagement during the National Day holiday offering Alibaba a strong start.

Alibaba Shares Surge on Nvidia Partnership and Global AI Expansion

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Alibaba announced on Wednesday a sweeping set of initiatives, including a partnership with Nvidia, new global data centers, and its largest-ever AI products, underscoring its pivot to make artificial intelligence a central business priority alongside e-commerce.

The news sent Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares up nearly 10% to a four-year high, while its U.S.-listed shares also rose by a similar margin in premarket trading.

“The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said at the company’s annual Apsara Conference. He added that spending on AI will be increased, though without specifying figures. Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) for AI infrastructure investments over three years.

As part of its strategy, Alibaba will collaborate with Nvidia to enhance physical AI capabilities including data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation, and validation testing.

The company also unveiled an ambitious global data center expansion plan, announcing facilities in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with more to follow in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai within the next year. This will add to Alibaba’s current network of 91 data centers across 29 regions. The company did not specify whether Nvidia chips would power these new facilities.

At the same event, Alibaba launched its most advanced AI language model to date, Qwen3-Max, boasting over 1 trillion parameters. According to CTO Zhou Jingren, the model demonstrates strong performance in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, allowing the AI to act more independently toward user-defined goals compared to traditional chatbots like ChatGPT.

Benchmark tests such as Tau2-Bench reportedly show Qwen3-Max outperforming competitors including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in specific categories.

Additional AI products showcased included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system designed for immersive applications in virtual and augmented reality, with potential use cases in smart glasses and intelligent vehicle cockpits.

The announcements come shortly after Nvidia revealed a $100 billion investment deal with OpenAI, highlighting the intensifying race in AI infrastructure.

Alibaba’s cloud division, which reported 26% revenue growth last quarter, is emerging as a key growth driver as the company monetizes its AI services more aggressively.

China summons ByteDance, Alibaba platforms over online content violations

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China’s Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has summoned ByteDance’s Toutiao news platform and Alibaba’s UCWeb browser unit for alleged content violations, adding them to the growing list of tech firms targeted in Beijing’s online crackdown.

According to separate statements issued Tuesday, both platforms were recently penalized for “disrupting the online ecosystem order,” with CAC imposing strict disciplinary actions against responsible personnel.

Alleged violations:

  • Toutiao: Allowed “harmful content” to appear in trending topic lists and other features.

  • UCWeb: Allowed non-authoritative sources and non-mainstream media to dominate trending topics, including coverage of sensitive and malicious events such as cyberbullying and the privacy of minors.

The summons comes as CAC launches a two-month nationwide campaign to remove violent or hostile content, part of a long-running effort to promote a “clean and healthy cyberspace” that aligns with Communist Party socialist values.

Industry-wide sweep

Toutiao said it welcomed the action, pledging to form a task force to combat non-compliant content and trolling. UCWeb has yet to issue a public statement.
CAC has also taken action in recent weeks against Kuaishou, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu (RedNote) for similar violations.

Wider regulatory push

The crackdown comes amid growing concern about public sentiment, as China faces economic headwinds and persistent youth unemployment. Other regulators are also stepping up:

  • The market watchdog summoned logistics platform Huolala over anti-monopoly compliance.

  • Days earlier, it launched an investigation into Kuaigou, an e-commerce arm of Kuaishou, for suspected e-commerce law violations.

Huolala described its summoning as a “profound wake-up call,” vowing stricter compliance going forward.

Beijing’s message is clear: online platforms must not only police content but also align with the state’s broader political and social stability agenda.