Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud, formally known as Aliyun, is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Hangzhou, China. It provides cloud infrastructure, data analytics, and AI services across Asia-Pacific and globally, and is the developer of the Qwen family of large language models.

The Qwen model series includes text, code, vision, and audio models available in various parameter sizes, released under open-weight licenses on platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope. Qwen models are used in enterprise applications, developer tooling, and consumer AI products. Alibaba Cloud holds a leading position in the Chinese public cloud market and competes internationally with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Alibaba Group is publicly listed on both the New York Stock Exchange (ticker: BABA) and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (ticker: 9988). Alibaba Cloud has been reported to employ tens of thousands of staff as part of the broader Alibaba Group, which employs over 200,000 people globally. In 2023, Alibaba announced plans to spin off Alibaba Cloud as an independent entity, though those plans were subsequently scaled back.