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Wency Chen

Alibaba Group Holding named its cloud unit’s technology officer Zhou Jingren, who also leads its artificial intelligence lab Tongyi and the development of its Qwen AI models, as a new member of the group in charge of steering the business empire, according to people briefed about the decision.
Alibaba has not updated the information on its official website. The Alibaba Partnership had 17 members before the addition, including co-founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai as permanent ones.
Alibaba did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
According to Alibaba’s website, a partner must have a high standard of personal character and integrity, as well as at least five years of continued service with Alibaba and a track record of contribution to its business.
Zhou is a renowned scientist in cloud computing and has served at Alibaba for more than a decade, following an 11-year stint at Microsoft.
He joined the company in 2015 as a vice-president and went on to oversee several core technical divisions, including big data and AI computing, search and recommendation systems on e-commerce platforms, and advertising technology.
He became chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud in 2022 after serving as deputy dean of Damo Academy, the company’s advanced research arm. In 2023, Zhou established the Tongyi AI Lab by consolidating several AI teams from Damo.
According to the Hangzhou-based company’s official website, new partners are elected annually following a nomination process and must secure approval from at least 75 per cent of existing members.
Zhou’s elevation is seen as recognition for his contributions to making the Qwen models the world’s most popular open-source AI models. The company said it had released more than 300 multimodal models of varying parameter sizes, with cumulative downloads exceeding 600 million and derivative models surpassing 170,000.
Also on Wednesday, Alibaba announced that its new Qwen app, a consumer-facing version, had won over 30 million monthly active users within 23 days of launch, making it one of the fastest-growing AI apps.
Alibaba has been on an aggressive AI push this year. In February, it pledged more than 380 billion yuan (US$54 billion) in AI-related capital expenditures over the next three years. CEO Eddie Wu Yongming suggested in November that strong demand for AI could lead the company to boost that figure.
The group has also begun stepping up its consumer-facing applications, creating a Qwen Consumer Business Group to develop its flagship AI chatbot, also named Qwen, in a bid to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, the Post reported on Tuesday.
The free, general-purpose chatbot, which can answer queries, transcribe audio, generate photos and videos, conduct research and produce slide decks, entered public beta on November 17.


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He will join the 17-member Alibaba Partnership, which steers the company’s course and includes co-founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai


He will join the 17-member Alibaba Partnership, which steers the company’s course and includes co-founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai.


Alibaba names AI-lab leader Zhou Jingren as new group partner

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}He will join the 17-member Alibaba Partnership, which steers the company’s course and includes co-founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai

He will join the 17-member Alibaba Partnership, which steers the company’s course and includes co-founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai