Alibaba has added its Amap mapping and navigation platform to the Qwen AI app, giving the AI assistant real‑world context for travel and lifestyle tasks. The integration brings Amap’s real‑time traffic feeds and more than 200 million points of interest into Qwen’s conversational interface, allowing users to request restaurant, hotel, and route recommendations without leaving the chat.
Amap powers the integration with a user base that reached 895.5 million monthly active users in June 2025 and 170 million daily active users, while the Qwen app itself grew to 18.34 million monthly active users after a 149 % surge in November 2025. The Qwen public beta, launched on November 17 2025, surpassed 10 million downloads in its first week. Amap’s own transformation into an AI‑native map app—powered by Qwen models—provides the data and predictive analytics that enable the new navigation features.
The move fits Alibaba’s “super‑app” strategy, which seeks to bundle e‑commerce, cloud, and local services into a single AI‑driven platform. By embedding Amap’s navigation into Qwen, Alibaba reduces the need for users to switch between apps for travel planning, deepening engagement across its ecosystem and creating a stronger data loop for AI training.
Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming said the Qwen launch marks the company’s commitment to “AI‑for‑enterprises and AI‑for‑consumers,” and that the goal is to build native AI‑first applications that leverage Alibaba’s ecosystem. Amap CEO Guo Ning highlighted the company’s “spatial intelligence” vision, noting that Amap 2025 turns maps from passive sensors into proactive, AI‑driven partners for users.
The integration supports Alibaba’s broader AI investment plan, which includes a commitment of at least 380 billion RMB (US $53 billion) over three years for AI infrastructure, foundational models, and AI‑native applications. Analysts view the move as a key growth lever for Alibaba’s cloud and AI units, which have been cited as the main drivers of the company’s recent performance. The partnership between Qwen and Amap is expected to accelerate user adoption of the AI assistant and reinforce Alibaba’s position against competitors such as Baidu and Huawei in the Chinese AI‑powered services market.
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