Alibaba surges over 6%! Why is the Hong Kong stock market experiencing a short squeeze?

On April 8th, the A-shares and Hong Kong stock markets collectively surged, with the Hong Kong tech sector sweeping away pessimism and staging a “short squeeze” rally. Alibaba, with a total market value exceeding 2.4 trillion yuan, saw its afternoon gains expand to 7%, and ETFs such as the Hang Seng Internet ETF Huaxia (513330.SH) followed suit with a sharp rise.

Industry insiders analyze that the reason behind the short squeeze in Hong Kong tech stocks is partly due to the easing of geopolitical crises, prompting funds to flow into liquidity-sensitive “valuation valleys”; on the other hand, domestic economic data for January and February exceeded expectations, with PPI turning positive in Q2, indicating a potential macroeconomic recovery inflection point; finally, the high short interest ratio in Hong Kong stocks, coupled with increased global stock market volatility, has reduced the risk-reward ratio of leveraged long and short trades, leading some short positions to be gradually closed.

On the news front, Alibaba-led internet giants have recently announced frequent breakthroughs in AI business developments, boosting their tech growth valuations.

On April 7th, OpenClaw founder Peter Stanberg announced that the next-generation OpenClaw product will incorporate video generation functions and will be the first to officially support Alibaba’s Qwen large model.

Last week, according to OpenRouter, China’s AI large model token usage reached 12.96 trillion tokens, a 31.48% increase from the previous week, surpassing the US for five consecutive weeks, with the gap continuing to widen. Among them, Alibaba occupies two spots in the TOP5 list: Qwen3.6Plus (free) topped the weekly call volume chart with 4.6 trillion tokens, and Qwen3.6PlusPreview ranked third on the weekly list.

On April 7th, Alibaba’s AI assistant Qianwen was upgraded with a new “Deep Research” professional capability, adding modules such as financial analysis, connecting to 13k real-time stock quotes and nearly one million corporate financial reports. On April 3rd, Alibaba released a newly upgraded Wan2.7-Video video generation model, covering text-to-video, image-to-video, reference-based video, and video editing, expanding AI capabilities from single-material generation to full creative workflows; on the same day, Code Arena announced a new ranking, with Alibaba’s Qwen 3.6-Plus ranking second globally, surpassing giants like OpenAI, Google, and xAI, making it the highest-ranked Chinese large model on the list. On April 2nd, Alibaba released its latest large language model—Qwen3.6-Plus, which features native multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities, and excels in code generation and agent abilities. It is also reported that a more powerful flagship model, Qwen3.6-Max, will be released soon.

Focus on Hang Seng Internet ETF Huaxia (513330.SH), which passively tracks the Hang Seng Internet Technology Index, listed on the A-share market, covering a basket of major internet platform giants (Alibaba accounts for 15%, with Tencent Holdings, Alibaba, Meituan, NetEase, JD.com, Baidu, totaling over 62%), with a single unit costing only a few hundred yuan, and offering low fee advantages.

Internet giants have accumulated advantages in engineering talent, application entry points, and massive user barriers during the mobile internet era. They possess strong AI technology integration and ecosystem capabilities, with obvious scene implementation advantages. Alibaba and Baidu Group also have independent domestic semiconductor chip manufacturers—Pingtouge and Kunlun Chip—whose computing power risks are relatively lower compared to other small-scale model providers.

Daily Economic News