Alibaba
Alibaba was founded in Hangzhou in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma. Joe Tsai is chairman and Eddie Wu is CEO. Its AI portfolio now spans Qwen language models, speech, images, video and interactive world generation.
Company & leadership
- Chairman
- Joe Tsai.
- CEO
- Eddie Yongming Wu, a co-founder; CEO and director since September 2023.
- Headquarters and legal location
- Major business executive offices are in Hangzhou. The holding company's principal executive offices are in Hong Kong; it is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
- Governance
- Alibaba Partnership has rights to nominate a simple majority of directors.
From a Hangzhou company to an AI business
Alibaba began with 18 founders. Its 2026 company timeline records Qwen3.5 in February, the Wukong enterprise AI platform in March, and HappyHorse and HappyOyster in April. These releases show the expansion from language models into video and interactive visual environments.
Eddie Wu's roles before becoming CEO
Wu was Alibaba's technology director at its founding. He later served as Alipay's CTO, led Alimama and became Taobao's CTO. He also worked on search advertising and mobile products. He founded Vision Plus Capital in 2015 before becoming Alibaba Group CEO in 2023.
Public ownership and partnership control
Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Cayman Islands holding company. Its Hong Kong listing became a primary listing in August 2024. The annual report separates public share ownership from Alibaba Partnership's board nomination rights. It also distinguishes the holding company's Hong Kong office from the Hangzhou offices of its major businesses.
Hosted services and published weights
Model Studio lists Alibaba models beside third-party models. This profile covers Alibaba's own reviewed releases. Hosted Qwen3.8 Max has visual input and a non-thinking mode that the published text-only Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B checkpoint does not provide.