ISTANBUL

Chinese tech giant Alibaba on Thursday reported a 7% year-on-year increase in revenues for the first quarter of 2025, led by a robust growth in the company's AI services.

The company posted a revenue of 236.5 billion yuan ($32.6 billion) in the first quarter, according to the company's financial results.

Revenues from Alibaba’s cloud computing services division, Cloud Intelligence, grew by 18% to 30.1 billion yuan ($4.18 billion), driven largely by increased demand for services related to artificial intelligence (AI).

The rise in Cloud Intelligence's revenue was attributed to the growing interest in AI-powered solutions.

Meanwhile, the firm’s net income climbed to 12.4 billion yuan ($1.7 billion) in the first quarter, growing by 279% year-on-year.

"We are confident in our business outlook and will continue to invest in our core businesses to strengthen our competitive advantages. We remain committed to enhancing shareholder returns," said Alibaba's CFO Toby Xu.

In February, US tech giant Apple announced a partnership with Alibaba to enable AI services on iPhones sold in China.

German auto giant BMW also announced in March that it would collaborate with Alibaba to integrate AI systems into vehicles sold in China and that it would develop an engine using Alibaba’s large language model (LLM), Qwen.

In April, Alibaba launched the latest version of its AI model, "Qwen3." In benchmark tests, Qwen3 demonstrated performance comparable to or exceeding that of US-based OpenAI's o1 and Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 models.