Eddie Wu

From technical leadership to group chief executive

Wu graduated from Zhejiang University of Technology’s College of Information Engineering in June 1996. He was Alibaba’s technology director at its founding in 1999, then held technical and business leadership roles at Alipay, Alimama and Taobao. He later led the group’s search, advertising and mobile businesses. In August 2015 he founded Vision Plus Capital. He became Alibaba Group’s CEO and a director in September 2023.[1]

Company strategy for an expanding AI business

Alibaba’s account of his leadership emphasizes infrastructure investment alongside model development and commercialization. It places Qwen within a broader portfolio that also includes cloud services and the company’s chip program. Wu’s contribution is organizational and strategic leadership across that portfolio. The products and research themselves are the work of their respective engineering teams.[3]

In his 2026 Apsara keynote, Wu describes Alibaba’s AI strategy through three connected layers: models, chips and cloud services. Models require compute for training and inference; chips supply that compute; cloud infrastructure makes it available to applications. He argues for optimizing those layers together, including interconnects and inference engines, rather than improving each component independently. The keynote presents a corporate roadmap for supplying AI capability at scale.[2]