Qwen’s ordering feature quietly processed millions of orders over Lunar New Year and much of February, turning text and voice prompts into a direct channel for food delivery, ride-hailing, and other services. Now, Alibaba is looking to take that experience beyond the smartphone and into hardware people can wear throughout the day.
According to 36Kr, citing sources familiar with the matter, Qwen is preparing to enter the hardware space. In 2026, Alibaba plans to launch a lineup of consumer devices embedded with artificial intelligence, including glasses, earbuds, and rings, with a global rollout strategy.
Among them, Qwen AI glasses debuted at the 2026 Mobile World Congress, with preorders scheduled to begin today.
To deepen cross-device integration, Alibaba plans to migrate functions currently embedded in the Qwen app, such as food ordering and ride-hailing, onto these wearables, 36Kr reported. The goal is continuity: accessing services with minimal friction, regardless of device.
Alibaba is not alone. Meta, after gaining early traction with its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, is reportedly building a broader wearable ecosystem centered on AI glasses. Media reports suggest its pipeline includes earbuds, neural wristbands, and smartwatches.
OpenAI has also reportedly assembled a hardware team of more than 2,000 people. It is said to be planning multiple consumer hardware releases either later this year or in 2027, spanning categories such as smart glasses, voice recorders, and wearable pins.
In China, ByteDance is also preparing its own glasses and earbuds.
Alibaba has already tested the waters. In 2025, its Quark team released AI glasses, while its DingTalk unit launched an AI-powered voice recording device, DingTalk A1. The next phase, however, appears more centralized and strategic.
That shift is reflected in internal restructuring. In December 2025, Alibaba merged its intelligent information and intelligent connectivity business groups to form a new consumer business group focused on Qwen. The unit now oversees the Qwen app, Quark, AI-driven hardware, and other consumer-facing operations under a unified structure.
Alongside these changes, Alibaba has been optimizing its AI models for on-device deployment.
On February 16, it open-sourced a next-generation large model, Qwen 3.5 Plus. The model reportedly uses 60% less memory while increasing maximum inference throughput by up to 19 times. On pricing, Qwen 3.5 Plus charges as little as RMB 0.8 (USD 0.11) per million tokens in API fees, about one-eighteenth the cost of Gemini 3 Pro, according to company disclosures. Memory footprint and operating cost are key constraints for edge devices, making such improvements strategically significant.
For Alibaba, the move appears to be about more than launching a few new gadgets.
Over the past decade, it has built a broad ecosystem of software, from Alipay to Amap, Taobao, Freshippo (also known as Hema), and Fliggy. What it has arguably lacked is a unifying interface that connects these services through Qwen.
That interface could remain an app. But it could also take the form of wearables that serve as a persistent gateway to Alibaba’s digital ecosystem. Glasses, earbuds, rings, and pendants are established wearable formats. They are lightweight, personal, and potentially always on.
There is also a data dimension. Devices worn throughout the day provide a channel to collect first-person, multimodal data from real-world interactions. For companies like Alibaba, such data could feed back into model training and refinement, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop that strengthens Qwen over time.
Alibaba may also have structural advantages in hardware. On the infrastructure side, it operates Tongyi, one of the largest open-source model families. It has developed its own chip subsidiary, T-Head Semiconductor, which produces the Zhenwu 810E processor, and runs Alibaba Cloud, one of the world’s largest cloud computing platforms by scale.
On the software side, Alibaba controls platforms across payments, mobility, e-commerce, grocery retail, and travel. In theory, AI agents could operate across these verticals within a unified ecosystem.
As Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu has previously noted, AI’s potential may lie less within the confines of a smartphone screen and more in how it navigates and manages the digital world. If Qwen becomes that gateway, Alibaba may be positioned to shape the next dominant interface in everyday life.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Qiu Xiaofen for 36Kr.