BABA Qwen 3.8 challenges Fable 5; Tencent doubles down on embodied AI | Daily News Recap

0720 | Dolphin Research: Key Focus

🐬 Macro/Industry

1. HKEX is assessing trading-hours reform, proposing to scrap the 12:00–13:00 lunch break and extend overall trading time; the plan is still under study, with broker and institutional feedback to follow. The goal is to boost overlap with US/EU and A-share trading windows, improving liquidity and global competitiveness. Near term, this is positive for HKEX itself, while longer hours would raise ops and staffing costs for brokers and asset managers. Medium to long term, whether volumes see a meaningful uplift remains debated.

🐬 Single Stocks

1.$BABA-W(09988.HK) Key updates follow.

Alibaba released a 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max preview on the Alibaba Cloud developer platform, guiding that a full open-source release of weights is imminent and positioning its capabilities against leading proprietary models such as Fable 5. The model spans text, image and long multimodal documents, paired with a low-cost token subscription to lower developer barriers. Keeping pace with Kimi K3’s open-source cadence, the domestic race in ultra-large models is accelerating. A richer open-source ecosystem should further reduce deployment costs for Chinese enterprises.

2.$TENCENT(00700.HK) Key updates follow.

At WAIC, Tencent upgraded its full-stack embodied-intelligence cloud services, covering robot training, simulation and cloud-based orchestration. It also rolled out the overseas edition of its enterprise agent platform ADP4.0, integrating with LINE and Google Workspace to enable cross-border agent development and monetization. By strengthening core robotics tech while pushing enterprise AI overseas, Tencent is building dual tracks for AI commercialization. This opens paid opportunities in overseas public- and enterprise-sector agents and reinforces Tencent Cloud’s global AI competitiveness.

3.$SK Hynix(SKHY.US) Key updates follow.

At the Jeju Forum, SK Chairman Chey Tae-won projected 60%–100% growth in AI semiconductor demand next year and 50%–60% growth in overall memory demand, noting virtually no effective new capacity coming online in the industry, which would widen the supply-demand gap. He cautioned that memory prices are at abnormally high levels and that continued increases could trigger industry backlash. The view reinforces expectations of a memory upcycle, benefiting HBM and the broader AI memory supply chain. In the near term, elevated expectations could amplify sector volatility.

4.$AMD(AMD.US) Key updates follow.

Industry checks via public code from AMD executives suggest Anthropic has obtained top-priority testing access to evaluate AMD’s MI350X training GPUs. Anthropic previously relied on Nvidia and Google TPUs; adding AMD diversifies supply and eases compute constraints. If adopted, Anthropic would become a flagship customer for AMD’s high-end AI chips, chipping away at Nvidia’s dominance. This would support a longer-term rerating of AMD’s server CPU/GPU franchise.

🐬 Top Gainers

A-shares: Oil & gas E&P, diversified chemicals, and electric utilities led. These sectors outperformed on the day. HK: Agricultural machinery, consumer goods retailers, and IT consulting were among the top gainers. Sector breadth skewed positive.

US: Agricultural products, diversified chemicals, and oil & gas refining & marketing outperformed. Leadership was concentrated in commodity-linked groups.

🐬 Watch for Tomorrow

1. None for now. No scheduled items.

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