Confirmed: Apple Intelligence in China will be powered by Alibaba

A few days ago a report claimed Apple had picked Alibaba to partner with in China for AI services, and today Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai has officially confirmed the news at the ominous-sounding World Government Summit in Dubai.

Tsai said: "They talked to a number of companies in China. In the end they chose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones. We feel extremely honored to do business with a great company like Apple".

Prior to making its pick, Apple had been in talks with Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent on the matter. Apple didn't go with AI hype darling DeepSeek either.

Apple has to have a local partner in China because over there AI services are required to have a permit from the government, which only hands out such permits to local companies. This is why Apple Intelligence hasn't been available in China so far. Now that Apple's found a partner, that is set to change soon.

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