Alibaba’s $420M New Year Giveaway Overloads Qwen App Despite Olympics AI Deal
Alibaba Cloud secured a partnership with Olympic Broadcasting Services and the International Olympic Committee to embed its Qwen large language model into Milano Cortina Winter Games’ digital infrastructure, powering AI Assistants and upgraded real-time replay capabilities. The company’s $420 million Lunar New Year cash incentive campaign for its Qwen consumer app triggered unprecedented traffic surges that crashed its entry systems.
1. Olympics Partnership
Alibaba Cloud announced a deal with Olympic Broadcasting Services and the International Olympic Committee to integrate its Qwen large language model into the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics digital infrastructure. The suite includes “Olympic AI Assistants” for fan engagement and operations, enhanced real-time replay processing, and upgraded cloud-based broadcasting systems.
2. Lunar New Year Campaign Strains Qwen
On February 3, Alibaba launched a $420 million cash-incentive campaign to drive downloads and usage of Qwen’s AI shopping features during the Lunar New Year holiday. The resulting traffic surge overwhelmed Alibaba’s systems, causing widespread access failures that the company is now scrambling to remedy by allocating additional resources.
3. Rapid User Growth and AI Expansion
Since its November relaunch with upgraded in-house LLMs, Qwen has amassed over 100 million monthly active users in just two months by embedding AI across Alibaba’s ecosystem for tasks from food orders to travel guidance. Concurrently, Alibaba’s T-Head unit unveiled the Zhenwu 810E parallel-processing processor to reduce dependence on Nvidia under tightening U.S. export controls.