Alibaba Group, headquartered in Hangzhou, China, is one of the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing companies, with a rapidly expanding presence in artificial intelligence. Founded in 1999 by Jack Ma, Alibaba has grown into a global technology powerhouse spanning retail, logistics, entertainment, and digital finance. In recent years, the company’s AI efforts have been concentrated in Alibaba Cloud and its research arm, DAMO Academy, making it a key driver of China’s AI strategy.
Alibaba’s flagship contribution to the generative AI era is the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) family of large language models. First introduced in 2023, Qwen was designed as a versatile foundation model capable of handling natural language, code, and multimodal tasks. It has since expanded into multiple versions, including lighter open-weight releases such as Qwen-7B and enterprise-scale offerings integrated into Alibaba Cloud services. This dual strategy—open releases for developers and proprietary enterprise models for business—has made Qwen one of the most widely adopted Chinese AI platforms.
The strength of Qwen lies in its integration across Alibaba’s ecosystem. Merchants use it to optimize product descriptions, customers interact with it through e-commerce assistants, and enterprises deploy it for document processing, customer service, and analytics. In addition, Alibaba Cloud has positioned Qwen as a foundation for retrieval-augmented enterprise applications, enabling companies to build secure, domain-specific AI systems on top of the model.
Alibaba has also emphasized multilingual capabilities, ensuring Qwen works across Chinese and global languages. Combined with its vast cloud infrastructure, this positions Alibaba as both a domestic champion and an international competitor in AI services.
By 2025, Alibaba had established Qwen as a cornerstone of its cloud business and a central piece of China’s national AI landscape. With Eddie Wu serving as CEO of the group and Daniel Zhang previously spearheading cloud and AI strategy, Alibaba continues to advance its vision of embedding AI into commerce, logistics, and digital infrastructure at global scale.
