AI 2026: Alibaba’s Qwen Seeks to Encourage AI Adoption
The Chinese e-commerce and data center giant has been releasing popular open-source AI models and investing in smaller AI labs. Its founder Jack Ma believes all AI adoption will be good for business.
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Alibaba is the second-most valuable technology company in China, with a market capitalization of nearly $400 billion (BABA) as of November 2025 and approximately $130 billion in revenues in 2024.1 Although it is primarily an e-commerce company that has been dubbed “China’s Amazon,” it today also hosts an elite artificial intelligence research lab and is one of China’s major providers of cloud computing services i.e. remotely renting out access to servers for computing and data storage, and building the large data centers to do this. Tongyi Lab oversees the development of the Qwen series of large language models (LLMs), which have become some of the most popular models in China for businesses, academics, and consumers. Almost all the Qwen models are released on highly permissive open-source licenses, allowing individuals to download them and external providers to offer them to customers without paying Alibaba. The models are also winning customers outside of China for their very low costs of inference i.e. usage and high performance: for example, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky recently revealed that Airbnb’s customer service chatbot is largely powered by Qwen models.2