HONOR and Alibaba have formalised a milestone strategic cooperation agreement in Hangzhou, China. James Li, CEO of HONOR Device Co., Ltd., and Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, were present to witness the signing.
This ground-breaking agreement is rooted in a shared ambition for expansion and aligned strategic priorities. The two technology giants will pursue a wide-ranging and systematic partnership across key fields, with a focus on AI ecosystems, AI models and capabilities, and intelligent services. The collaboration aims to nurture a robust AI ecosystem while capitalising on the vast opportunities presented by AI-led industrial transformation and the convergence of smart device platforms.
Within the AI agent ecosystem, HONOR and Alibaba will combine their respective technological advantages and resources in AI agents, large-scale AI models, intelligent services, and next-generation application experiences. This alliance will result in close collaboration across core user scenarios, such as travel navigation, tourism, lifestyle services, mobile office, e-commerce, and entertainment. Through ongoing technical exchange and shared resources, the two sides will jointly pioneer innovative functions and new modes of interaction for mobile devices.
On the subject of AI models and capabilities, the partnership will focus on the co-development of applications based on the Qwen open-source model. This encompasses vertical application models for on-device AI, AI agents, and multimodal understanding and generation. The ultimate goal is to create a world-leading “cloud-device integrated” intelligent experience by combining the Qwen large model with HONOR’s advanced hardware, operating system, and diverse user scenarios. This collaboration will hasten the refinement of large model technology for scenario-driven and on-device use, delivering smarter, more personalised, secure, and seamless AI services to HONOR MagicOS users.
The partnership will also strengthen cooperation on MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) capabilities. This includes the ongoing enhancement and integration of features across text, multimodal, image, video, and voice applications. Both companies will explore training, fine-tuning, and inference for on-device and cloud-based AI models, whether derived from the Qwen open-source model or jointly developed. Their ambition is to deliver advanced on-device models that set new State-of-the-Art (SOTA) benchmarks.
Looking ahead, the collaboration is set to grow further. Supported by Alibaba’s vast commercial service ecosystem and enabled through the MCP (Multi-Cloud Platform) protocol, a range of vertical intelligent agents – including Ele.me (food delivery), Damai (ticketing), and Taopiaopiao (film ticketing) – will gradually be integrated. This will broaden the Agent ecosystem to cover more lifestyle scenarios such as dining, entertainment, office tools, and online retail, giving users increasingly efficient and convenient services.
Through this initiative, AI will become ever more embedded in daily life. HONOR’s forthcoming HONOR Magic8 Series, positioned as the most advanced AI-native smartphone with self-evolving capabilities, will showcase a wide range of AI services and scenarios co-created by HONOR and Alibaba for users in China.
