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Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and the developer of the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) large language model family, which is released as both open weights and proprietary models.

Founded 2009Website alibabacloud.com Era Statistical learning

2026 · 1 20162026
Events per year

What it is

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing subsidiary of Alibaba Group. It was launched in September 2009, and its campus headquarters is in Yuhang, Hangzhou. Its international operations are registered in Singapore [1]. Wikipedia describes it as the largest cloud computing company in China and, according to Gartner, in Asia Pacific [1]. Within the company, the team that develops the Qwen models is known as the Qwen Team, and the group's research work has also appeared under the names Tongyi Lab and 通义实验室 [2].

Origins

The Qwen (通义千问, Tongyi Qianwen) family of large language models was launched as a beta in April 2023 and opened to the public in September 2023 [2]. Alibaba created the ModelScope model platform after China restricted access to Hugging Face in 2022, [2].

The open-weight line has grown in steps. Qwen-7B came out in August 2023, followed by Qwen1.5 in February 2024, Qwen2 in June 2024 and Qwen2.5 in September 2024. Qwen3 was released in April 2025, then Qwen3.5 in February 2026, Qwen3.6 in April 2026 and Qwen3.8 in August 2026 [2][3].

Main features

Most of the open Qwen models since Qwen2 have been released under the Apache 2.0 license. The Qwen3 repository states that all of its open-weight models are Apache 2.0 [3]. Apache 2.0 is a permissive license that allows commercial use.

The size of the ecosystem is one of the clearest signs of that spread. Alibaba has said that its 100-plus open models had been downloaded more than 40 million times by September 2024. Over 200,000 Qwen-derived models are listed on Hugging Face, where the Qwen organization itself hosts 469 models [2][4].

Alibaba's proprietary flagships form a separate line. Qwen2.5-Max arrived in January 2025, Qwen3-Max in September 2025 with more than one trillion parameters, and Qwen3.8-Max in August 2026 with 2.4 trillion parameters [2]. Alibaba also develops the Wan (通义万相) video models, which have been open-sourced since February 2025 [2].

Qwen has also been adopted by outside projects. In November 2025 AI Singapore said it would replace LLaMA with Qwen as the base for its Sea-Lion model [2].

Its place in development

Alibaba's position in the field rests on combining an open-weight family, which invites outside use, with proprietary flagships that carry its commercial products. In March 2026 Qwen division head Lin Junyang resigned. Alibaba then formed the Token Hub AI unit under CEO Eddie Wu, with Zhou Jingren as chief AI architect, and restructured the Tongyi Large Model Business Unit, which had formerly been known as Tongyi Laboratory [2].

The company's models have also drawn attention beyond China. In June 2026 Anthropic told the U.S. Senate Banking Committee that operators linked to Alibaba and its Qwen lab had used nearly 25,000 accounts to make over 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June. China's government later said that the U.S. accusations were groundless [1].

CapabilitiesLarge language models

TechniquesFoundation models

Ecosystem & regionOpen sourceChinaCloud

20261

  1. ReleaseAlibaba unveils its Zhenwu PPU chip

    On 29 January 2026 Alibaba's chip unit T-Head listed the Zhenwu 810E, formally revealing a PPU accelerator the company had kept under wraps and completing its combination of Qwen models, cloud and chips.

20251

  1. Milestone01.AI steps back from giant-model pre-training

    In early 2025, 01.AI denied reports that it was selling its pre-training team to Alibaba; large-model training moved into a joint lab with Alibaba, while 01.AI focused on smaller, cheaper models and enterprise platforms built around DeepSeek.

20241

  1. FundingAlibaba leads a US$1 billion round in Moonshot AI

    In February 2024 Alibaba led a US$1 billion funding round in Moonshot AI at a US$2.5 billion valuation, roughly eight times the startup's earlier valuation and, by reporting at the time, the largest single round for a Chinese AI startup.

20231

  1. ReleaseAlibaba launches the Tongyi Qianwen chatbot model

    In April 2023 Alibaba launched Tongyi Qianwen as a beta, and in September 2023 it opened the model to the public. The project later took the international name Qwen.

20161

  1. ReleaseHangzhou launches City Brain with Alibaba Cloud ET

    On 13 October 2016 Alibaba Cloud announced a Hangzhou project, led by the municipal government, that used its ET AI programme and big-data analytics to predict traffic in real time and adjust traffic lights.

Models and products over time

25
  1. 2023
    • Apr 2023 Qwen app (Tongyi) Product

      The Qwen app is Alibaba's consumer chatbot built on its Qwen models. It began as a beta of Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023 and has since added app integrations and reached 234 million users by May 2026.

    • Aug 3, 2023 Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen, 2023) Model

      Qwen, known in Chinese as Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问), is Alibaba's family of large language models. Its first open-weight model, Qwen-7B, was released on 3 August 2023, and the family has grown through many later versions.

    • Aug 24, 2023 Qwen-VL Model

      Qwen-VL is a family of vision-language models released in August 2023 that builds on the Qwen language model to caption images, answer questions about them, locate objects and read text, with open Base and Chat versions.

  2. 2024
    • Feb 5, 2024 Qwen1.5 Model

      Qwen1.5 is the Qwen family's open model release of February 2024, with base and chat models from 0.5B to 72B parameters, later extended to 110B, and a mixture-of-experts model.

    • Jun 7, 2024 Qwen2 Model

      Qwen2 is the Qwen family's June 2024 generation, with five sizes from 0.5B to 72B parameters, context lengths up to 128K tokens, and most sizes released under Apache 2.0.

    • Aug 29, 2024 Qwen2-VL Model

      Qwen2-VL is Alibaba's vision-language model released on 29 August 2024. It understands videos longer than 20 minutes, reads text in many languages, and can act as an agent on phones and robots.

    • Sep 19, 2024 Qwen2.5 Model

      Qwen2.5 is the Qwen family's September 2024 generation. Its launch included 13 open-weight models, with up to 18 trillion pretraining tokens, 128K context and most models under Apache 2.0.

    • Nov 28, 2024 QwQ-32B-Preview Model

      QwQ-32B-Preview is an experimental reasoning research model released by the Qwen team on 28 November 2024, with 32B parameters, a 32K-token context and open Apache 2.0 weights. It scored strongly on maths benchmarks but the team documented clear failure modes.

  3. 2025
    • Jan 2025 Qwen2.5-VL Model

      Qwen2.5-VL is Alibaba's vision-language model family released in January 2025 in 3B, 7B, 32B and 72B sizes. It reads charts and documents, localises objects, works as a visual agent and understands videos over an hour long.

    • Jan 28, 2025 Qwen2.5-Max Model

      Qwen2.5-Max is Alibaba's large mixture-of-experts model, announced in January 2025. It was offered through Qwen Chat and the Alibaba Cloud API, and its weights were not released.

    • Feb 25, 2025 Wan2.1 Model

      Wan2.1 is Alibaba's open-source video generation model family, released on 25 February 2025 under Apache 2.0. It creates videos from text or images and can render Chinese and English text.

    • Mar 6, 2025 QwQ-32B Model

      A 32-billion-parameter open-weight reasoning model released by the Qwen team on 6 March 2025, trained mainly through scaled reinforcement learning and reported to perform comparably to the much larger DeepSeek-R1.

    • Mar 26, 2025 Qwen2.5-Omni Model

      Qwen2.5-Omni is Alibaba's end-to-end multimodal model that takes text, images, audio and video as input and answers with text and natural speech. The 7B version was released on 26 March 2025.

    • Apr 29, 2025 Qwen3 Model

      Qwen3 is a family of large language models from Alibaba, released on 29 April 2025 under Apache 2.0. Its main feature is hybrid thinking, which lets one model reason step by step or answer directly.

    • Jul 21, 2025 Qwen3-2507 Model

      Qwen3-2507 is a staged 2025 refresh of the open-weight Qwen3 models that split thinking and non-thinking into separate checkpoints, raised native context to 262,144 tokens, and scored far above the original non-thinking mode on published benchmarks.

    • Jul 22, 2025 Qwen3-Coder Model

      Qwen3-Coder is an open-weight family of coding models from the Qwen team; its flagship 480B-parameter model, announced in July 2025, was built and trained specifically for agentic coding tasks.

    • Jul 28, 2025 Wan2.2 Model

      An open family of video generation models released in July 2025 under the Apache 2.0 licence, notable for bringing a two-expert mixture-of-experts design to video diffusion and for a 5B model that runs on a single consumer GPU.

    • Aug 4, 2025 Qwen-Image Model

      A 20-billion-parameter open-weights image generation model released by Qwen in August 2025, notable for rendering text inside images, especially Chinese.

    • Sep 2025 Qwen3-Max Model

      Qwen3-Max is Alibaba's proprietary trillion-parameter language model, released in September 2025 and served through Alibaba's API. It is the Max-tier flagship that followed Qwen2.5-Max.

    • Sep 2025 Qwen3-Next Model

      Qwen3-Next is an open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in September 2025 under Apache 2.0. It has 80B total parameters, only 3B active per token, and a hybrid attention design later used in Qwen3.5.

    • Sep 2025 Qwen3-VL Model

      Qwen3-VL is Alibaba's open vision-language model family, released in September 2025 under Apache 2.0. Its 235B flagship handles long video, GUI operation and 2D and 3D grounding.

    • Sep 2025 Qwen3-Omni Model

      Qwen3-Omni is an open-weight multimodal model released by the Qwen team in September 2025 under Apache 2.0, able to take in text, audio and video and to answer in text or speech across many languages.

  4. 2026
    • Feb 16, 2026 Qwen3.5 Model

      Qwen3.5 is a natively multimodal model family from Alibaba released in February 2026. Its open flagship, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, has 397B total parameters and 17B active per token, under Apache 2.0.

    • Apr 2, 2026 Qwen3.6 Model

      A generation of Alibaba's Qwen models released in April 2026, spanning proprietary Plus and Max versions aimed at agentic coding and open-weight models such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a 35B-parameter mixture-of-experts with 3B active parameters.

    • Aug 3, 2026 Qwen3.8 Model

      Qwen3.8 is Alibaba's 2026 flagship line. Its open 2.4-trillion-parameter model, Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, released in August 2026, has 95B active parameters and a custom license.

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Notes and sources

  1. Alibaba Cloudhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Cloud
  2. Qwenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen
  3. QwenLM/Qwen3 repositoryhttps://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3
  4. Qwen organization pagehttps://huggingface.co/Qwen

Cite this page: Alibaba Cloud. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/alibaba-cloud. Updated 2026-11-08