Alibaba Group / Qwen

Alibaba Group builds AI models, cloud infrastructure and commerce platforms for consumers and businesses. Its Qwen family of language and multimodal models powers enterprise services and consumer applications. Developers can use downloadable Qwen models locally or integrate hosted models through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, which offers APIs, SDKs, model comparison and monitoring tools. The consumer Qwen App connects with Alibaba services, including Taobao’s product catalog, while its Wukong enterprise platform brings AI agents into business workflows.

Founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, Alibaba initially sought to help small enterprises compete through Internet technology. Co-founder Eddie Yongming Wu, its original technology director, has served as CEO since 2023. Qwen’s engineering contributions include Qwen3’s integrated reasoning and non-reasoning modes, allowing users to adjust computational effort to the task. Its dense and mixture-of-experts releases also give developers a choice of model architectures and sizes for deployment.

The company reported that consumer-facing Qwen surpassed 300 million monthly active users across all platforms in February 2026. Alibaba Group completed an HK$80 billion placement of new shares in August 2026, with proceeds intended to expand computing infrastructure, build AI data centers and upgrade cloud storage, databases and networking.