Alibaba AI

Alibaba AI refers to the artificial-intelligence work of Alibaba Group Holding Limited, a Chinese multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in Hangzhou. Alibaba develops the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) family of large language models, one of the most-downloaded open-weight model families in the world, and delivers them through Alibaba Cloud, its Model Studio developer platform, and the Tongyi (now Qwen) consumer apps. Under CEO Eddie Wu the company has made AI and cloud a core growth pillar, committing at least 380 billion yuan (about US$53 billion) over three years (announced 24 February 2025) to AI and cloud infrastructure, the largest such private-sector commitment ever announced in China ^[4][5][6].

Alibaba's AI activities are organised primarily around three vehicles: DAMO Academy, the company's central research arm founded in October 2017; Alibaba Cloud, the cloud-services subsidiary that began operations in September 2009 as Aliyun and now ranks fourth among global infrastructure-as-a-service providers; and the Qwen family of large language models, originally introduced in April 2023 under the consumer brand Tongyi Qianwen ^[1][2][3].

Since late 2023 Alibaba has positioned AI as the centre of its corporate strategy. CEO Eddie Wu, who took office on 10 September 2023 alongside chairman Joseph Tsai, has repeatedly described the company as pursuing an "AI-driven, user-first" agenda, and on 24 February 2025 the firm committed at least 380 billion yuan (about US$53 billion) over three years to AI and cloud infrastructure, the largest single private computing project ever announced in China ^[4][5][6]. The Qwen models, released mostly under permissive open-weight licences, have made Alibaba arguably the most-downloaded open-weight LLM provider in the world, alongside Meta's Llama family, with the Qwen3 series alone training on roughly 36 trillion tokens spanning 119 languages ^[7][8]. By January 2026 the Qwen family had passed 700 million cumulative downloads on Hugging Face and spawned more than 180,000 derivative models, the most prolific open-source LLM lineage to date ^[36].

How is Alibaba involved in AI?

Alibaba is involved in AI at three layers of the stack. As a model maker, its Qwen / Tongyi Qianwen team publishes the Qwen open-weight family plus proprietary flagship variants. As a cloud and platform provider, Alibaba Cloud sells AI compute, the Platform for AI (PAI) machine-learning suite, and the Model Studio generative-AI platform that exposes Qwen and the Tongyi Wanxiang image and video models through APIs. As a product company, it embeds AI across e-commerce (Taobao, Tmall), workplace software (DingTalk), logistics (Cainiao) and consumer chat (the Tongyi app, rebranded "Qwen" in early 2026). Chairman Joseph Tsai summarised the approach in 2025: "Having an integrated, full-stack approach is our core strategy" ^[37].

Alibaba Group was founded in 1999 in Hangzhou by Jack Ma and seventeen co-founders as a B2B marketplace connecting Chinese exporters with overseas buyers. The group listed on the NYSE in September 2014 under the ticker BABA in what was then the largest IPO in history, and added a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (9988) in November 2019 ^[1]. Today its consumer e-commerce platforms (Taobao, Tmall, AliExpress, Lazada), its cloud and AI businesses (Alibaba Cloud, DAMO Academy, ModelScope), its logistics arm Cainiao, and its digital-media holdings sit under one roof, while the financial-services affiliate Ant Group operates separately under common-control links.

The leadership reshuffle of 2023 was the proximate trigger for Alibaba's current AI focus. On 20 June 2023 the company announced that Daniel Zhang would step down as chairman and CEO; Joseph Tsai (Cai Chongxin), an Alibaba co-founder and longtime executive vice chairman, would become chairman; and Eddie Wu Yongming, another co-founder who had served as the group's first technology director, would become CEO. Both transitions took effect on 10 September 2023 ^[4]. Wu also took direct charge of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group in September 2023 and personally oversaw Taobao and Tmall Group from December 2023, running Alibaba's two largest engines as part of one AI-led story ^[9].

Key AI executives include:

Scroll sideways for more →

What is DAMO Academy?

The Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook, universally known as DAMO Academy, was launched on 11 October 2017 at Alibaba's Computing Conference in Hangzhou. Then-CTO Jeff Zhang announced a commitment of more than US$15 billion in research-and-development spending over three years, and said the academy would build seven labs in Beijing, Hangzhou, San Mateo, Bellevue, Moscow, Tel Aviv and Singapore, recruiting roughly 100 researchers in the initial wave ^[10][13]. The advisory board was deliberately international, drawing professors from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, the University of Washington, Columbia, Beijing Institute of Technology, Peking University and Zhejiang University, with collaboration ties to UC Berkeley's RISE Lab ^[10].

DAMO's stated remit covers data intelligence, the Internet of Things, financial intelligence, quantum computing and human-machine interaction, with deeper specialisations in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, network security and autonomous driving ^[10][14]. Notable research outputs over the years include AliceMind (a family of pre-trained language models open-sourced in 2021), the OFA "One-For-All" 6-billion-parameter cross-modal model, and the M6 series of multimodal multitask transformers. M6 itself went through three jumps in 2021: a 100-billion-parameter version in March, a 1-trillion-parameter version in June, and a 10-trillion-parameter sparse version announced in November, which Alibaba claimed it trained on 512 GPUs while consuming roughly 1 percent of the energy of a comparable GPT-3-class run ^[15][16]. The PLUG and ChatPLUG dialogue models followed in 2022 and early 2023 and laid groundwork for the eventual Tongyi Qianwen launch.

Not every part of the original blueprint survived. In November 2023 DAMO Academy closed its quantum-computing laboratory, donating its research equipment to Zhejiang University and saying the academy would refocus on artificial intelligence ^[17]. Several of the international labs have been quietly restructured during the period of US-China technology tensions, although the Sunnyvale and Seattle offices remained active as of late 2025.

What is Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen)?

Qwen, branded Tongyi Qianwen in Chinese, is Alibaba's family of large language models, spanning open-weight base and instruct models plus larger proprietary "Plus" and "Max" flagships, all developed by the Qwen team inside Alibaba Cloud. Tongyi Qianwen, which translates roughly as "truth seeking by asking a thousand questions," is the consumer brand under which Alibaba launched its first generative-AI chatbot. The product was unveiled on 11 April 2023 at a press event in Beijing by then-CEO Daniel Zhang, with Alibaba positioning it as a Chinese alternative to ChatGPT capable of working in both Chinese and English ^[18][19]. Initial integration targets were Alibaba's workplace tool DingTalk and the Tmall Genie smart-home line; public access opened in September 2023 after Chinese regulators completed their approval process ^[7][19].

The English-language model brand Qwen (a contraction of Qianwen) is now used for the open-weight series. Open releases began in August 2023 with Qwen-7B and the multimodal Qwen-VL, expanded across the rest of 2023 with Qwen-14B (September), Qwen-Audio (November) and Qwen-72B plus Qwen-1.8B (December), and have continued at a rapid cadence ever since ^[7][20]. In early 2026 Alibaba rebranded the standalone Tongyi consumer app as the "Qwen" app, rebuilt on the Qwen3 model, to compete more directly with ChatGPT in the consumer market ^[7].

When was each Qwen model released?

Scroll sideways for more →

Is Qwen open source?

The early Qwen weights shipped under the company's own "Tongyi Qianwen Research" agreement, which was free for research and required a separate application for commercial use beyond a 100-million monthly-active-user threshold. From Qwen2 onwards the bulk of the family has shipped under Apache 2.0, with only the largest 72B and a few specialised variants (such as Qwen2.5-3B) keeping a more restrictive licence ^[7][24]. By late 2025 Alibaba had released over 100 open-weight Qwen variants and the family had accumulated more than 600 million downloads on Hugging Face, with over 170,000 derivative models built on top of Qwen, surpassing Meta's Llama by both metrics ^[11][28]. According to Xinhua, by January 2026 cumulative Qwen downloads on Hugging Face had reached 700 million and the family had spawned more than 180,000 derivative versions, having overtaken Llama in cumulative downloads by October 2025 ^[36].

What are the technical highlights of Qwen?

Qwen models are designed around a Transformer decoder architecture. The original Qwen-7B used a standard rotary-position-embedding setup; from Qwen1.5 onward the team aligned more closely with the Llama-style stack, including SwiGLU activations, grouped-query attention in larger sizes, and Mixture-of-Experts in Qwen2-57B-A14B, Qwen3-30B-A3B and Qwen3-235B-A22B ^[22][24][8].

Key capabilities span:

• Multilingual coverage. Qwen2.5 supports more than 29 languages including Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and Arabic ^[25]. Qwen3 expands this to 119 languages and dialects in pre-training data ^[8].
• Long context. Qwen2-72B-Instruct and Qwen2-7B-Instruct support 128K-token context windows natively, and the team has demonstrated extension to 1 million tokens via YaRN scaling for select Qwen2.5 variants ^[24][25].
• Code generation. The Qwen-Coder line, peaking at Qwen2.5-Coder-32B, is competitive with DeepSeek-Coder and Codestral, and the Qwen team also publishes a separate Qwen-Code CLI on GitHub for terminal use.
• Mathematics. Qwen-Math models support chain-of-thought, program-of-thought and tool-integrated reasoning, with the 72B version comparable to closed leaders on MATH and GSM8K.
• Multimodal I/O. Qwen-VL, Qwen2-VL and Qwen2.5-VL handle still images and video; Qwen-Audio and Qwen2-Audio handle speech, music and ambient sound; Qwen2.5-Omni unifies vision, audio, text and limited speech generation in one 7B model.
• Reasoning. The QwQ line, starting with QwQ-32B-Preview on 27 November 2024, was Alibaba's first openly published reasoning model, using long chain-of-thought traces generated by reinforcement learning over Qwen2.5-32B ^[26]. Qwen3 then folded reasoning into the main family via a switchable "thinking" mode that lets users decide how much deliberation the model spends on a query ^[8].

Flagship Qwen3-235B-A22B has activated 22 billion of its 235 billion parameters per token and reaches 85.7 on AIME'24, 81.5 on AIME'25, 70.7 on LiveCodeBench v5 and 2,056 on Codeforces, scores that the Qwen team reports as competitive with DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1-mini ^[8][27].

How does Alibaba deliver AI through Alibaba Cloud?

Alibaba Cloud, originally Aliyun, opened for business in September 2009 and grew into China's largest cloud provider. By 2025 it remained the fourth-largest infrastructure-as-a-service vendor globally, behind Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, with worldwide IaaS share rising to 7.7 percent (up from 7.2 percent in 2024) and Asia-Pacific share at 22.5 percent according to Gartner's April 2026 figures ^[29]. The company operates 78 data centres across the Asia-Pacific region and ranks first by revenue in mainland China and Hong Kong, second in Indonesia and Malaysia, and third in Singapore ^[29].

The firm's AI products sit on two main platforms. Platform for AI (PAI) is the long-running suite for end-to-end machine-learning workflows, including PAI-DSW (data-science workshop), PAI-Studio for visual workflow design, and PAI-EAS (Elastic AI Serving) for scalable model deployment ^[30]. Model Studio is Alibaba Cloud's generative-AI platform launched in 2023 and expanded internationally in 2024, exposing Qwen, Qwen-VL and the visual-generation model Tongyi Wanxiang via APIs comparable to those of OpenAI or Anthropic; Model Studio also offers an OpenAI-compatible endpoint so existing OpenAI client code can call Qwen models with minimal changes ^[30][31][38].

On the open-source side, ModelScope opened on 3 November 2022 at the Apsara Conference as a Hugging-Face-style "Model-as-a-Service" community, initially with about 300 ready-to-deploy models drawn from DAMO Academy ^[32]. By 2025 it had grown into China's largest open-source AI community, hosting more than 70,000 models and serving more than 16 million developers across 36 countries ^[32].

At the chip layer, Alibaba's semiconductor subsidiary T-Head (formally known as Pingtouge) has been designing custom silicon since 2018. Its first AI chip, Hanguang 800, was unveiled at the 2019 Apsara Conference: a 12-nanometre, ~17-billion-transistor inference accelerator that hit 78,563 images per second on the ResNet-50 benchmark and 500 inferences-per-watt for power efficiency ^[33]. Hanguang has since been used for image search and city-management workloads inside Alibaba; in production AI training Alibaba relies on a mix of NVIDIA GPUs (within the limits of US export controls, including the H20 part shipped to China), Huawei Ascend accelerators and its own custom designs.

How much is Alibaba investing in AI?

On 24 February 2025 Alibaba committed to invest at least RMB 380 billion (about US$53 billion) in cloud and AI infrastructure over the following three years, a figure the company says exceeds its combined cloud-infrastructure spending over the previous decade and which it called the largest-ever investment by a private Chinese enterprise in cloud and AI hardware ^[5][6][39]. The plan was later signalled to grow: in late September 2025 Alibaba indicated it would raise the total above the original US$50 billion figure ^[34].

Scroll sideways for more →

Eddie Wu, on the analyst call accompanying the announcement, said Alibaba would "aggressively invest" in the new build-out and tied the spending plan to a five-year revenue target of US$100 billion in cloud and AI ^[5][6]. He framed the moment as a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity, with artificial general intelligence (AGI) set as the company's primary long-term objective, and warned that AI demand was so strong the supply chain was "not even able to keep pace" ^[39]. Chairman Joseph Tsai put a market figure on the bet: "The US$50 trillion-dollar opportunity is the TAM of AI, and that's why we're all in" ^[37].

What other AI products and services does Alibaba offer?

Beyond the cloud and the Qwen models, Alibaba ships AI capabilities through the broader portfolio. Taobao and Tmall use machine-learning recommendation engines for ranking, search and personalised marketing, and added more than ten generative-AI features for merchants in 2024 along with a generative chat assistant called Wenwen for shoppers ^[9]. The workplace tool DingTalk integrates a Tongyi-powered assistant for meeting summaries, document drafting and code generation, and the low-code platform Modao surfaces AI-generated UI components.

The logistics arm Cainiao runs AI-driven warehouse and last-mile operations: a 30,000-square-metre automated facility uses around 1,000 autonomous mobile robots to handle 34,000 SKUs at peak picking rates of 600 pieces per station per hour and a reported 99.99 percent accuracy ^[35]. In 2026 Cainiao began rolling out a global network of robotic warehouses across Hong Kong, mainland China, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Germany and the United States, paired with an AI scheduling system for routing and collision avoidance ^[35]. The related but separately operated Ant Group runs Alipay's biometric-payment, fraud-detection and insurance-underwriting models. Inside Alibaba Cloud, the visual-generation model Tongyi Wanxiang covers text-to-image and text-to-video, and the speech-recognition stack (QASR) handles real-time transcription for contact-centre and live-streaming workloads.

How does Alibaba compare with other AI companies?

Alibaba is one of several major AI players in China, and increasingly compares directly with American hyperscalers and frontier labs. The table below sketches the landscape as of early 2026.

Scroll sideways for more →

In 2025 the Qwen family overtook Meta's Llama in raw monthly downloads on Hugging Face and in the count of fine-tuned derivative models, making Alibaba the most cited single source of open-weight LLM capacity globally ^[11][28]. DeepSeek emerged in early 2025 as the most disruptive Chinese rival, with V3 and R1 showing that frontier-grade reasoning could be trained on roughly US$5.6 million in compute ^[28]. Qwen is the more prolific publisher of model variants and the more widely fine-tuned base; DeepSeek tends to set the high-water mark for individual benchmark scores at any given time.

How does geopolitics shape Alibaba's AI?

Alibaba's AI work happens against the backdrop of the wider China-US technology contest and broader Chinese AI policy. From October 2022 onward, US export controls have tightened access to NVIDIA's most advanced datacentre GPUs (A100, H100 and successors), forcing Chinese cloud providers to rely on de-rated parts such as the H20, on Huawei Ascend hardware, or on domestic designs such as Hanguang 800. The same export regime has pushed Alibaba toward more aggressive efficiency engineering, which is one reason its mid-sized models compete on benchmarks with much larger Western systems.

Domestic policy has cut both ways. The Chinese government's 2017 "Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan," the 2024 "AI+" initiative, and the sandbox programmes for foundation-model approval have all helped the case for sustained investment. The post-2020 regulatory crackdown on platform companies, which forced the suspension of Ant Group's IPO in November 2020 and produced a record antitrust fine for Alibaba in April 2021, weighed heavily on the firm's stock and capital plans for several years. The 2023 leadership change and the early-2025 stock recovery (following both DeepSeek's R1 launch and the US$53 billion infrastructure announcement) marked the first sustained rebound of the post-crackdown era, with the AI narrative doing most of the work.

What is happening with Alibaba AI in 2024 to 2026?

In February 2024 Eddie Wu sent a widely reported internal memo defining "AI-driven" and "user value" as Alibaba's two strategic anchors, and in the following twelve months the company pushed Qwen releases out at a near-monthly cadence. The Qwen2 family arrived on 6 June 2024 and Qwen2.5 on 19 September 2024, both with permissive licensing on most variants, while Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and industry-specific Tongyi models were unveiled at the October 2023 Apsara Conference and refreshed annually ^[25][30]. In its FY2025 shareholder letter, Tsai and Wu reaffirmed that "e-commerce and 'AI + Cloud' ... are the twin engines powering our long-term growth" ^[37].

The February 2025 infrastructure commitment, paired with QwQ-32B-Preview in late November 2024 and the Qwen3 launch on 29 April 2025, pushed BABA stock to four-year highs through the spring and again in September 2025 when Alibaba signalled it would raise total AI capex above the original US$50 billion figure ^[34]. By the time Qwen3 shipped, cumulative downloads across the Qwen family had crossed 600 million on Hugging Face and Alibaba was hosting over 70,000 models on ModelScope ^[11][32].

Qwen3.5 small models launched in February 2026, and on 3 March 2026 longtime Qwen technical lead Junyang Lin and two other senior researchers departed in a brief exit announced via Lin's X post: "me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen" ^[11][12]. Alibaba consolidated its open-source and AI efforts under a new Alibaba Token Hub, which Wu said he would "lead ... directly, with a mandate to drive strategic coordination across our AI businesses" ^[38]. Qwen3.6 followed in April 2026, with the open Qwen3.6-35B-A3B under Apache 2.0 and Qwen3.6-Plus offered through the Tongyi (Qwen) consumer chat and Alibaba Cloud APIs.

ELI5: Alibaba and AI in plain terms

Alibaba is a giant Chinese internet company, a bit like Amazon plus a big cloud-computing business. It builds its own AI "brains," a family of models called Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen in Chinese), and it gives away many of the smaller versions for free so anyone can download and use them. It also rents out AI computing power through Alibaba Cloud, and it is spending a huge amount of money, about US$53 billion over three years, on the data centres and chips needed to run AI. Its bosses, CEO Eddie Wu and chairman Joe Tsai, have said AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that the company is "all in."

See also

• Qwen
• Tongyi Qianwen
• Alibaba Cloud
• Alibaba Group
• ModelScope
• DeepSeek
• Artificial intelligence in China
• Mixture of Experts

References

1. Alibaba Group, About Us, https://www.alibabagroup.com/en-US/about-alibaba ↩
2. Alibaba Cloud, Our Story, https://www.alibabacloud.com/about ↩
3. Wikipedia, Qwen, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen ↩
4. SEC Form 6-K, "Alibaba Group Announces Chairman and CEO Transition," 20 Jun 2023, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1577552/000110465923072478/tm2319146d1_ex99-1.htm ↩
5. Bloomberg, "Alibaba to Spend $53 Billion on AI Infrastructure Over Three Years," 24 Feb 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-24/alibaba-to-spend-53-billion-on-ai-infrastructure-in-big-pivot ↩
6. South China Morning Post, "Alibaba commits US$53 billion for AI infrastructure in largest private computing project," Feb 2025, https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3299858 ↩
7. Wikipedia, Qwen (model release timeline), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen ↩
8. Qwen Team, "Qwen3: Think Deeper, Act Faster," 29 Apr 2025, https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/ ↩
9. South China Morning Post, "New Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu sharpens focus on AI and users," Sep 2023, https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3234213 ↩
10. TechCrunch, "Alibaba Group will invest $15B into a new global research and development program," 10 Oct 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/10/alibaba-group-will-invest-15b-into-a-new-global-research-and-development-program/ ↩
11. TechCrunch, "Alibaba's Qwen tech lead steps down after major AI push," 3 Mar 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/alibabas-qwen-tech-lead-steps-down-after-major-ai-push/ ↩
12. TechNode, "Qwen technical lead Lin Junyang leaves Alibaba, sources say," 4 Mar 2026, https://technode.com/2026/03/04/qwen-technical-lead-lin-junyang-leaves-alibaba-sources-say/ ↩
13. Quartz, "Alibaba is plowing $15 billion into R&D with seven new research labs worldwide," Oct 2017, https://qz.com/1099535/ ↩
14. DAMO Academy, About Damo Academy, https://damo.alibaba.com/about?language=en ↩
15. InfoQ, "Alibaba Announces 10 Billion Parameter Multi-Modal AI M6," Apr 2021, https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/04/alibaba-m6-model/ ↩
16. Pandaily, "Alibaba DAMO Academy Creates World's Largest AI Pre-Training Model," Nov 2021, https://pandaily.com/alibaba-damo-academy-creates-worlds-largest-ai-pre-training-model-with-parameters-far-exceeding-google-and-microsoft ↩
17. The Quantum Insider, "Reports: China's Alibaba Shuts Down Quantum Lab," 25 Nov 2023, https://thequantuminsider.com/2023/11/25/reports-chinas-alibaba-shuts-down-quantum-lab/ ↩
18. CNBC, "Alibaba to roll out its rival to ChatGPT across all its products," 11 Apr 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/alibaba-to-roll-out-its-rival-to-chatgpt-across-all-its-products.html ↩
19. TechNode, "Alibaba rolls out ChatGPT alternative Tongyi Qianwen," 10 Apr 2023, https://technode.com/2023/04/10/alibaba-rolls-out-chatgpt-alternative-claims-world-first-of-breaking-10-trillion-parameters/ ↩
20. GitHub, QwenLM/Qwen, https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen ↩
21. Hugging Face, Qwen/Qwen-Audio, https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Audio ↩
22. Qwen Team, "Introducing Qwen1.5," 4 Feb 2024, https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen1.5/ ↩
23. Qwen Team, "Qwen1.5-110B: The First 100B+ Model of the Qwen1.5 Series," 25 Apr 2024, https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen1.5-110b/ ↩
24. Qwen Team, "Qwen2 Technical Report," arXiv:2407.10671, https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10671 ↩
25. Qwen Team, "Qwen2.5: A Party of Foundation Models!," 19 Sep 2024, https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5/ ↩
26. TechCrunch, "Alibaba releases an 'open' challenger to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model," 27 Nov 2024, https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/27/alibaba-releases-an-open-challenger-to-openais-o1-reasoning-model/ ↩
27. Qwen Team, "Qwen3 Technical Report," arXiv:2505.09388, https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09388 ↩
28. Understanding AI, "The best Chinese open-weight models and the strongest US rivals," 2025, https://www.understandingai.org/p/the-best-chinese-open-weight-models ↩
29. Alibaba Cloud, "Alibaba Maintains Leading Position by Revenue as Asia Pacific's Largest Cloud Provider," Apr 2026, https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/603054 ↩
30. Alibaba Cloud, "Alibaba Cloud Launches Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and Industry-specific Models," Oct 2023, https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/600526 ↩
31. South China Morning Post, "Alibaba Cloud rolls out expanded suite of AI models," Sep 2024, https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3295689 ↩
32. Alibaba Cloud, "Alibaba Cloud Launches ModelScope Platform," Nov 2022, https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/599467 ↩
33. Alibaba Cloud, "Announcing Hanguang 800: Alibaba's First AI-Inference Chip," Sep 2019, https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/announcing-hanguang-800-alibabas-first-ai-inference-chip_595482 ↩
34. Bloomberg, "Alibaba Shares Soar After Hiking AI Budget Past $50 Billion," 24 Sep 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-24/alibaba-to-raise-spending-on-ai-above-50-billion-plan ↩
35. Warehouse Automation, "Alibaba's Cainiao Expands Global Network of Robotic Warehouses," 2026, https://www.warehouseautomation.ca/news/cainiao-to-roll-out-global-ai-robotic-warehouse-network-25zd5 ↩
36. Xinhua, "Alibaba's Qwen leads global open-source AI community with 700 million downloads," 13 Jan 2026, https://english.news.cn/20260113/004b0522f987475cbf83ffc3a8d009aa/c.html ↩
37. Alibaba Group, "Joe Tsai on the Future of AI: Full-Stack Value Drives Alibaba's Confidence," 2025-2026, https://www.alibabagroup.com/en-US/document-2004662016358219776 ↩
38. Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, "Call Qwen models via OpenAI-compatible API," https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/compatibility-of-openai-with-dashscope ↩
39. Alibaba Cloud, "Alibaba to Invest RMB 380 billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure Over Next Three Years," 24 Feb 2025, https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-to-invest-rmb380-billion-in-ai-and-cloud-infrastructure-over-next-three-years_602007 ↩