As the global tech sector was catching up to the disruption caused by DeepSeek’s r1 AI model, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced its brand new Qwen 2.5 AI model on the first day of the Lunar New Year. The Qwen 2.5 is pre-trained on large-scale multilingual and multimodal data and rivals DeepSeek’s AI model.

U.S. stocks slipped after the Federal Reserve held its main interest rate steady and broke a run of cuts that began in September

Microsoft has tested Wall Street's patience by plunking down huge amounts of cash in pursuit of profits from AI that have yet to satisfy investors.

Microsoft on Wednesday forecast disappointing growth in its Azure cloud computing business, sending its shares down more than 5% as investors worry about big spending, elusive artificial intelligence revenue and growing competition from cheaper AI models from China.