Citi: Maintains "Buy" rating on BABA-W (09988), H-share target price at HK$189

Citi issued a research report maintaining its "Buy" rating on BABA-W (09988), with a target price of US$190 for Alibaba's (BABA.US) US shares and HK$189 for its H-shares. The second day of the Yunqi Conference further reinforced the company's unique capabilities in multi-layer monetization across IaaS, MaaS, and AI-native applications. Following the announcements on the first day, the second day showcased end-to-end product execution details across the entire AI technology stack. The bank noted that Alibaba Cloud plans to open new computing regions in Turkey, Finland, and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, in addition to its existing 31 regions and 107 availability zones, and to expand data centers in Malaysia, Germany, the UAE, France, and Hong Kong SAR, China. High-density AI data centers are 5 to 10 times denser than traditional facilities and can be deployed within 100 days. On the T-Head front, the Lingjun intelligent computing service has expanded the M890 Hypernode, featuring 9TB of memory and 51.2TB/s of bandwidth, supporting MoE models with up to approximately 10 trillion parameters and clusters of up to 130,000 cards. It has already served over 100 enterprise customers, and the new service is planned to launch in Ningxia in the fourth quarter of 2026. The bank continued that the Tongyi Qianwen AI platform has been upgraded to a low-latency enterprise-grade agent infrastructure, with prompt caching costs reduced by over 95%, average Time Per Output Token reduced to 5 milliseconds, and offering 99.9% SLA and encrypted inference. Alibaba also launched AI-native tools including Meoo 1.0, VoicePica 2.0, Wan Xiaozhi 3.0, and the international version of WonderClip, as well as product updates such as the Happy Oyster world model, Qwen-Audio-3.1, Jingrui AI, and Qwen Book.