Alibaba
China's giant of online marketplaces, which also runs a major cloud.
Alibaba Group was founded in 1999 in Hangzhou, China, by Jack Ma and a group of partners. It started with Alibaba.com, a website where small Chinese manufacturers could find buyers abroad, and it is still where many businesses around the world go to order products in bulk directly from factories.
It then built marketplaces for consumers. Taobao, launched in 2003, lets anyone open a shop and sell to shoppers in China; Tmall is the version for established brands; AliExpress sells to buyers in other countries. Alibaba usually does not own the goods: it makes money from the fees and, above all, the advertising sellers pay to stand out. It also popularized the 11 November "Singles' Day" sales festival, and runs logistics through its Cainiao network.
Like Amazon with AWS, Alibaba turned the computing infrastructure it needed for its own shopping peaks into a business. Alibaba Cloud, also called Aliyun, started in 2009 and is the largest cloud provider in China, renting servers, storage and databases, and it develops the Qwen family of AI models, many released as open weights. The payments app Alipay, often associated with it, belongs to Ant Group, a separate company in which Alibaba holds a stake.
Keep in mind
- Founded in 1999 in Hangzhou; started as a site connecting Chinese factories with buyers abroad.
- Runs Taobao, Tmall and AliExpress, earning mostly from seller fees and ads.
- Alibaba Cloud is China's largest cloud provider and makes the Qwen AI models.
- Alipay belongs to Ant Group, a separate company linked to Alibaba.
