Learn About Alibaba Cloud's AI Products
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Start Learning Free📋About Alibaba Cloud
Updated August 1, 2026Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and the largest cloud provider in Asia Pacific. Founded in 2009, it serves millions of customers across more than 200 countries and regions, offering a comprehensive suite of cloud infrastructure, data intelligence, and AI services.
Alibaba Cloud's AI portfolio centers on the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) family of large language models, which rank among the most capable open-weight models globally. Qwen models are available in sizes from 0.5 billion to 72 billion-plus parameters, with specialized variants for coding (Qwen-Coder), math (Qwen-Math), and vision (Qwen-VL). The company also offers Model Studio for fine-tuning, PAI (Platform for AI) for ML operations, and a broad set of pre-built AI services for NLP, computer vision, and speech.
As the infrastructure backbone for Alibaba's e-commerce, logistics, and fintech operations, Alibaba Cloud brings massive-scale AI deployment experience. Its aggressive open-sourcing of Qwen models has made it one of the most important contributors to the open-weight AI ecosystem alongside Meta and Mistral.
Qwen's most consequential distribution win came in July 2026, when China's Cyberspace Administration cleared Apple Intelligence for release in China with Qwen as the model powering text and image understanding and generation across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS for Chinese users. Apple evaluated Baidu, DeepSeek, and ByteDance before selecting Alibaba, with Baidu contributing a smaller model alongside Qwen. The arrangement puts Alibaba's models in front of one of the largest premium device populations in the world, and makes Alibaba Cloud the default AI layer for the iPhone in Apple's most important market outside the United States.
🛠️Products & Tools (3)
Alibaba's reasoning model (Apache 2.0). 32B parameter chain-of-thought specialist. Part of the broader Qwen3.5 family. Competes with larger models on math and logic benchmarks.
Alibaba's Qwen3.5 model family chat interface. Flagship 397B-A17B with Gated DeltaNet+MoE, 262K-1M context. 100+ languages. 9B model matches GPT-OSS-120B on GPQA Diamond.
Alibaba Tongyi Lab's suite of three foundation models for embodied AI — Qwen-RobotNav for navigation, Qwen-RobotManip for object manipulation, and Qwen-RobotWorld for physics-aware world prediction. Together they form a software stack that lets robots move through spaces, handle objects, and reason about the physical world, launched into pilot testing with Alibaba Cloud enterprise customers in June 2026.