Surging interest in artificial intelligence is generating huge gains for Chinese tech stocks like Alibaba, which has more than doubled this year.

The vast Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou stood as a rebuke to U.S. efforts to hem in China’s technology. But the real competition is internal, and profits are hard to find.

The Persian Gulf nation has “open sourced” technology meant to compete with OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek.