Alibaba is a Chinese e-commerce giant founded by Jack Ma. As of mid-2025 its market capitalisation was around $285bn. It runs a food-delivery service called Ele.me. In early 2025 JD.com entered the food-delivery market, sparking a three-way price war with Ele.me and Meituan. Alibaba attacked JD by offering "instant purchases" of goods such as electronics via its Taobao platform, promising delivery in under an hour.
In April 2025, in response to American tariffs of 145% on Chinese goods, Alibaba announced an "export channel" allowing Chinese manufacturers to sell products originally made for export on the domestic market instead.
Between 2021 and 2024 villages in poor parts of China made sales worth 441bn yuan on Alibaba's platforms.
In 2021 China's antitrust watchdog SAMR cracked down on Alibaba's monopolistic practices. That same year Ant Group, Alibaba's financial subsidiary, was forced to share its consumer-credit data with China's central bank as the government moved to centralise control over the economy's data flows. In June 2025 Ant Group launched AQ, a telemedicine app; by September it had served 140m patients and nearly 1m doctors had offered their services on the platform.
Alibaba powers the "city brain" in Hangzhou, a city in the Yangzi Delta where it is headquartered. The brain feeds data from cameras, government records, traffic lights and police reports into an AI system that helps track pollution, reduce congestion and aid emergency services. Other cities across China are racing to build their own brains.
As of 2025 Alibaba is building vast numbers of AI data centres.
On May 11th 2026 Alibaba announced it had fully integrated Qwen, its chatbot, with Taobao, its shopping app, so the AI can procure products and services with a few commands. Adjusted operating profit in Alibaba's Chinese e-commerce division was down by 40% year on year in the first quarter of 2026.
In February 2026, ahead of the Lunar New Year, Alibaba launched an upgrade to its Qwen chatbot adding "agentic" capabilities that allow bots to perform tasks such as ordering a meal with a few spoken instructions. More than 100m drinks were sold via Qwen during the Lunar New Year period. Industry insiders dubbed the resulting subsidy spectacle the "hongbao wars": Chinese AI companies handed out coupons worth 8bn yuan ($1.2bn) to anyone willing to download and use their applications. On March 4th 2026 Lin Junyang, the chief engineer behind Qwen, unexpectedly quit Alibaba.
In September 2025 Qwen became the most popular family of models on Hugging Face, dethroning Meta's Llama. Alibaba has released some 400 open Qwen models, from which developers have created more than 180,000 derivative versions. In November 2025 Singapore's national AI programme announced that its Sea-Lion model had switched from Llama to Qwen, running on Alibaba's cloud infrastructure. Airbnb is among Western companies now using Qwen.
Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 large language model served as the foundation for the UAE's K2 Think reasoning model, developed by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence—a choice over American open-source alternatives such as Meta's Llama that reflects the UAE's careful calibration of its positioning between America and China in AI.
Alibaba has become a prolific open-source funder and contributor. Its Qwen AI model is among the most highly rated open-source models globally. In August 2025 Alibaba released Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507, an open-source reasoning model that brought Chinese AI level with not just the best open-source models but the best AI models full stop. Qwen3 is around a quarter the size of Moonshot AI's Kimi K2, requiring commensurately less computing power to run. Alibaba's substantial cloud infrastructure means it can keep its models running, unlike Chinese rivals that lack the capacity to serve customers directly. Alibaba co-founded the OpenAtom Foundation with Huawei, Baidu and Tencent to promote open-source development. After America and India, China is home to the largest group of developers on GitHub, the world's biggest repository of open-source software.
In October 2025 Alibaba became the first big Chinese firm to announce it was pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Alibaba has launched a long-form animated series called "The Demon Hunter", which has more than 10m followers, as an alternative to the wave of AI-generated micro-dramas flooding China's entertainment market.
Goldman Sachs estimates that China's big cloud-computing providers—Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance and Tencent—will invest $70bn in 2026 in data-centre infrastructure, with a particular focus on Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
Alibaba leads China's cloud market. In the first quarter of 2025 its cloud sales grew by 18% year on year. China's cloud-computing sales are expected to exceed $50bn in 2025 and reach nearly $80bn by 2027, with demand for AI accounting for much of that growth. In May 2025 Alibaba announced it was expanding its cloud services globally, aiming to be available in dozens of countries. Hosting one of the world's largest e-commerce marketplaces provides it with masses of consumer data that can be fed into AI models to refine product recommendations and improve advertising.
If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%?