Alibaba Group

Alibaba Group is a technology company working across AI, cloud computing and e-commerce, with a stated mission to make it easy to do business anywhere. The company describes its aim as building the future infrastructure of commerce and says it aspires to be a good company that lasts for 102 years. That aim gives a common thread to activities that might look separate: e-commerce connects buyers and sellers, while cloud computing and AI supply the processing capacity and software that businesses increasingly run on.

Through Alibaba Cloud, the company provides infrastructure for training and running AI models, with services that include the Platform for AI (PAI), Model Studio (also called Bailian) for accessing its Qwen family of models, and AgentCore for building, running and managing AI agents. T-Head, the company's chip design unit, develops Zhenwu AI training and inference processors and Yitian CPUs, and its Zhenwu chips serve customers in industries including automobile, finance, energy and manufacturing. Hyperscale cloud providers commonly design their own silicon to lower costs and depend less on outside suppliers, and that is the context in which the chip unit sits alongside the company's models and cloud services.

Alibaba Cloud operates 107 availability zones in 31 regions, with data center capacity in markets that include Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong. Its enterprise customers include Panasonic Digital (Shanghai), which uses Qwen models through Model Studio to run AI agents across manufacturing, supply chain and corporate functions. Cloud platforms of this kind let businesses rent computing capacity and use hosted AI models as services, rather than building and maintaining that infrastructure themselves.