Investing.com -- Shares of Alibaba Group in the U.S. rose around 5% in premarket trading after Chinese regulators cleared Apple’s on-device artificial intelligence system for release in the country, a long-delayed approval that pairs the iPhone maker with Alibaba’s Qwen AI model for users in the world’s largest smartphone market.

Apple shares gained close to 1% in the pre-open trade.

The Cyberspace Administration of China on Wednesday added Apple’s generative AI services to a list of newly approved providers, putting the company alongside domestic players such as Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi Corp. An Alibaba spokesperson said Qwen AI will be available across iOS, iPadOS and macOS for users in China, enabling text and image recognition and generation.

Apple Intelligence was unveiled in 2024 but has taken years to bring to China. The suite of AI tools has been reworked substantially in the interim, after the technology giant shifted its underlying technology and rebuilt the system on top of Alphabet’s Google Gemini models.

Approval gives Apple access to a market of consumers eager to try new AI products. The rollout is expected to add momentum to Apple’s recent recovery in China, where the company has been working to narrow the gap with market leader Huawei.

Alibaba, meanwhile, has consolidated its various AI offerings under the Qwen brand and has been pushing the assistant deeper into its own ecosystem, including Taobao, Tmall and other platform services, while positioning Alibaba Cloud as critical infrastructure for China’s broader AI buildout. The Apple partnership gives Qwen a high-profile new distribution channel beyond Alibaba’s own apps, reaching hundreds of millions of iPhone users in China.

CNBC reported on Tuesday that Apple is in early-stage talks with PrismML, a Khosla Ventures-backed Caltech spinout, about compression technology that would shrink Alibaba’s open-source Qwen 3.6 model from roughly 54 GB to under 4 GB, enabling a 27-billion-parameter model to run entirely on an iPhone 15 or newer device.

"They’re really evaluating our technology right now. Things are progressing nicely," PrismML CEO Babak Hassibi told CNBC.

Neither Apple nor Alibaba detailed a timeline for when the AI features will begin appearing on user devices following the regulatory approval.