Hisense gives Alibaba a route for its cloud and AI services into TVs and appliances sold overseas, while Hisense's Nazhen unit deepens its role supplying Alibaba's AI data centers.
Alibaba and Hisense have upgraded their partnership into what the two companies call AI full-stack cooperation, covering everything from data-center hardware to AI agents in Hisense’s televisions, the 21st Century Business Herald reported on November 4. Alibaba Group chief executive Eddie Wu and Hisense Group president Yu Zhitao witnessed the signing, together with Chen Yusen, an Alibaba Group vice president and chief executive of QwenWork, and Xia Feng, Hisense Group’s chief capital officer.
The agreement was signed for the two sides by Gao Fei, a vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, and Zhang He, Hisense Group’s chief information officer. The companies will work across five layers, infrastructure, computing power, model services, agents, and business and ecosystem, and roll out cooperation layer by layer according to business needs, Jiemian reported.
The 21st Century Business Herald grouped the work into four directions: building full-stack capabilities together, expanding overseas together, deepening technical cooperation and upgrading marketing intelligence. Hisense is accelerating its shift toward becoming a technology company with AI at the core of its industrial ecosystem, the newspaper said, and sees Alibaba’s AI and cloud computing experience as a fit for that change. The push comes as Hisense’s listed appliance arm, Hisense Home Appliances, reported a 20.16% fall in first-half 2026 net profit to RMB1.658 billion, according to Jiemian.
No financial terms were disclosed, and neither report gave a timeline or quoted the executives involved. The agreement extends a relationship that began in 2010 and has covered e-commerce, optical communications, content platforms, cloud and AI, according to the 21st Century Business Herald.
Hisense’s TVs will be built around agents
The most visible consumer change is planned for Hisense’s televisions. The two companies will jointly develop a new generation of smart TVs and smart-home products centered on "agent-defined functions" and "emotional companionship," the newspaper reported. The goal is a new system of AI interaction across AI devices, smart homes and computing hardware.
Jiemian summarized the agreement’s aims as a next-generation AI interaction system, a self-controllable technical foundation and an AI-native organization. That last goal applies inside Hisense itself: Alibaba will help Hisense build an AI-native organization using tools such as QwenWork (千问办公), Alibaba’s enterprise AI agent product, to redesign its end-to-end business processes.
The companies also plan to strengthen cooperation on marketing intelligence, though the reports did not describe specific projects.
The deal runs both ways in AI hardware
Alibaba is a customer of Hisense as well as a supplier. Hisense’s optical networking unit Nazhen Technology has become one of Alibaba’s leading suppliers of high-speed interconnects for AI computing. Nazhen listed in Hong Kong in September. It provides part of what the companies call a green computing foundation, the 21st Century Business Herald reported. The two sides will also deepen product cooperation for AI data centers.
That supply relationship links the agreement to the spending boom in Chinese AI infrastructure. High-speed optical links connect the chips and servers in AI clusters, and every expansion of Alibaba’s computing capacity needs more of them. A closer strategic tie keeps a domestic supplier of those links close to Alibaba’s build-out.
The partnership also has an overseas dimension. The companies will build an "AI plus going global" system that combines computing power, cloud, e-commerce and logistics, taking cloud and AI capabilities already proven in China abroad alongside Hisense’s international business. They described the aim as a replicable benchmark for the globalization of Chinese AI. EastFrontier reported in September on Alibaba Cloud’s new European data-center map, which gives that overseas cooperation existing infrastructure to build on.
A first TV with Alibaba’s agents will be the proof
The clearest proof of the agreement will be a Hisense television or smart-home product launched with Alibaba’s AI agents built in, and whether it ships in overseas markets as well as China.
On the infrastructure side, the measure is Nazhen Technology’s share of Alibaba’s optical interconnect purchases as Alibaba adds AI capacity. A joint overseas cloud project, such as Alibaba Cloud services bundled into Hisense’s business abroad in a named market, would show the "AI plus going global" plan moving from intention to deployment.