Eddie Wu

Eddie Wu, also known by his Chinese name Wu Yongming, is one of Alibaba’s founding engineers and became group chief executive in 2023. He also ran the cloud division directly for a period, which tells you where he thinks the company’s future is.

Under him Alibaba has pushed hard on two fronts at once: the Qwen model family, much of which is released with open weights and is widely used well beyond China, and the infrastructure underneath it, including in-house chips and very large data centre commitments. His Apsara keynotes are where those plans are usually announced.