Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 397B-A17 beats its larger trillion-parameter model — at a fraction of the cost

Alibaba dropped Qwen3.5 earlier this week, timed to coincide with the Lunar New Year, and the headline numbers alone are enough to make enterprise AI buyers stop and pay attention.

The new flagship open-weight model — Qwen3.5-397B-A17B — packs 397 billion total parameters but activates only 17 billion per token. It is claiming benchmark wins against Alibaba's own previous flagship, Qwen3-Max, a model the company itself has acknowledged exceeded one trillion parameters. 

The release marks a meaningful moment in enterprise AI procurement. For IT leaders evaluating AI infrastructure for 2026, Qwen 3.5 presents a different kind of argument: that the model you can actually run, own, and control can now trade blows with the models you have to rent.

A New Architecture Built for Speed at Scale

The engineering story underneath Qwen3.5 starts with its ancestry. The model is a direct successor to last September's experimental ...