# Alibaba Cloud: physical AI company Canonical ID: `e7a85963-b9a7-4088-b8b5-d5557b80d4e0` ## Key facts - **Founded:** September 2009 as Aliyun, in Hangzhou, China - **Parent + ticker:** Wholly owned by Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE: BABA; HKEX: 9988); planned 2023 spinout of the cloud unit was cancelled in November 2023 - **Announced AI + cloud capex:** More than 380 billion yuan (about 53 billion USD) committed to AI and cloud infrastructure over three years, announced February 2025 - **Global footprint:** Data centers across 29 regions and 87 availability zones worldwide per company disclosure; the largest cloud operator in China and APAC per Gartner - **GPU inventory:** Not disclosed. Public reporting has Alibaba Cloud as one of the largest buyers of Nvidia's China-only H20 accelerator and of Huawei Ascend 910B/910C; no vendor-mix number has been released by the company - **Announced hourly GPU pricing:** Not published as a single global rate card; A100/H20 instances are quoted per-region on the Alibaba Cloud ECS console rather than in a headline reserved-vs-on-demand table - **Silicon partnerships:** Nvidia (H20 for China; H100/H200 for international regions), Huawei Ascend, AMD, plus in-house T-Head Yitian 710 ARM CPU launched October 2021 - **Anchor tenant:** Itself: Qwen model training and inference, Taobao/Tmall commerce, DingTalk, Cainiao logistics, and Ele.me all run on Alibaba Cloud; external anchor customers include Xiaohongshu and much of the Chinese enterprise SaaS ecosystem - **Proprietary model family:** Qwen open-weights LLMs (launched April 2023); Qwen3-Max at roughly 2.4 trillion parameters released August 2026, with distilled variants under Apache 2.0 - **AI platform product:** PAI (Platform for AI) is the training + inference layer; Qwen models are served through PAI-EAS and Model Studio - **2025-2026 expansion:** New availability zones opened in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico, and the UAE as part of the three-year capex commitment - **Positioning:** Full hyperscaler doing both training and inference at hyperscale volumes; unlike Western neoclouds it is its own largest AI customer via Qwen and Alibaba consumer properties - **Slug:** alibaba-cloud - **Status:** active - **Founded:** 2009 - **HQ:** Hangzhou, China (international HQ Singapore) ## Models _No models registered._ ## Current leadership (3) - [Eddie Wu](/people/eddie-wu.md) CEO, Alibaba Group; direct oversight of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group since September 2023 (_reported, not verified_) - [Joe Tsai](/people/joe-tsai.md) Chairman, Alibaba Group (_reported, not verified_) - [Jingren Zhou](/people/jingren-zhou.md) CTO, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence (_reported, not verified_) ## Supplies to _No verified supply relationships on file. Supply-chain coverage is being added across the registry; check back as the seed populates this company's outbound edges._ _Outbound supply edges. Each appears when verified with at least two strong sources. Sources are append-only; corrections add new sources rather than rewrite history._ ## Common questions ### What is Alibaba Cloud? Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) is the cloud and AI infrastructure arm of Alibaba Group, founded in September 2009 in Hangzhou and today the dominant public-cloud operator in China and the Asia-Pacific market by Gartner and IDC share. Unlike the pure-play neocloud pack (CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe), Alibaba Cloud is a full hyperscaler: it sells IaaS, PaaS, databases, and CDN alongside GPU capacity, and its AI story rides on two proprietary pillars, the PAI (Platform for AI) training and inference stack and the Qwen family of open-weights foundation models that Alibaba itself trains, serves, and licenses.\n\nIn February 2025 the company said it would spend more than 380 billion yuan (about 53 billion US dollars) on cloud and AI infrastructure over the following three years, a figure larger than its combined AI-infra spend across the prior decade and the biggest disclosed AI capex commitment by any Chinese company. The build-out is constrained on the silicon side by US export controls: Alibaba Cloud has publicly bought Nvidia's China-only H20 accelerators, has ramped in-house T-Head Yitian ARM CPUs, and is one of the biggest customers for domestic Chinese AI chips including Huawei Ascend, though it has not disclosed a total GPU count. It operates data centers across 29 regions and 87 availability zones globally as of its most recent disclosure, with 2025-2026 expansion pushes into Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines), Mexico, and the Middle East (Dubai, Riyadh).\n\nWhat separates Alibaba Cloud from the Western neocloud set is that its anchor tenant is itself: Qwen inference, Taobao and Tmall commerce, Ele.me delivery, Cainiao logistics, and DingTalk collaboration all run on it, and the Qwen-3 series (culminating in Qwen3-Max at trillion-plus parameters, released in 2026) has become one of the most widely deployed open-weights model families outside the US. Positioning is genuinely dual: it is a training platform for its own frontier models and for enterprise fine-tunes, and a very high-volume inference operator for Chinese and Southeast Asian consumer traffic. Alibaba Group trades on NYSE (BABA) and HKEX (9988); the cloud unit sits inside the Alibaba Group holding structure after a planned 2023-2024 spinout was called off. ### What does Alibaba Cloud make? Alibaba Cloud has no robot models recorded on the DEPLOY registry. Alibaba Cloud builds physical robots. ### Is Alibaba Cloud publicly traded? Alibaba Cloud is not independently listed on public markets; it is part of Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE: BABA on the DEPLOY registry. ### How can I invest in Alibaba Cloud? Alibaba Cloud has no separately traded stock; it is owned by Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE: BABA (the parent is the entity that trades, where it is public). ### Where is Alibaba Cloud headquartered? Alibaba Cloud is headquartered in Hangzhou, China (international HQ Singapore). ### Who owns Alibaba Cloud? Alibaba Cloud is owned by Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE: BABA, per the DEPLOY registry. ### Is Alibaba Cloud a top robotics company? On DEPLOY's intelligence score, which blends verified deployments, funding, hiring, media, safety, and IP signals, Alibaba Cloud ranks in roughly the top 100% of companies tracked by the registry. ## Sources (5) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Cloud 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen 3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/24/alibaba-to-invest-more-than-53-billion-in-ai-infrastructure-over-next-three-years.html 4. https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/about 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group ## The verified answers - [Which companies have the most robots deployed](/which-companies-have-the-most-robots-deployed.md) - [Which operators run the most robots](/which-operators-run-the-most-robots.md) - [Which robot operators cover the most countries](/which-robot-operators-cover-the-most-countries.md) _API: GET /v1/companies/e7a85963-b9a7-4088-b8b5-d5557b80d4e0 ยท canonical URL: /companies/alibaba-cloud_