Alibaba Co-Founder Sees Open-Source Qwen Driving Cloud Demand

Alibaba Group Holding BABA co-founder and Chair Joe Tsai opted to open-source its Qwen models, citing their potential to drive demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications and cloud computing.

The open-sourcing large language models (LLMs) would contribute to Alibaba’s cloud computing business by democratizing the usage of AI and proliferating applications, SCMP reported, citing Tsai at the VivaTech trade show in Paris on Wednesday.

Tsai highlighted Alibaba’s AI developers and researchers ditching their Lunar New Year holiday after Chinese startup DeepSeek launched its AI reasoning model in January before the Lunar New Year.

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The Chinese startup claimed to beat rivals like OpenAI at a fraction of their cost.

Alibaba’s Qwen models are among the popular open-source LLMs, SCMP cited Hugging Face rankings. However, Tsai also acknowledged environmental challenges remain.

Alibaba made its Qwen3 Embedding series available for developers last week. In May, Alibaba showcased ZEROSEARCH technology, which it said can cut AI training costs by nearly 90%.

Benchmark analyst Fawne Jiang noted Alibaba as a leading beneficiary of accelerated AI adoption in China and a top structural player in the sector.

Alibaba committed at least 380 billion yuan ($52 billion) in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years.

Alibaba Cloud is China’s largest cloud service provider, with over one-third of the market.

Price Action: BABA stock traded lower by 1.81% to $114.53 premarket at the last check Friday.

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