Alibaba is facing the future of AI and continues to upgrade its organization.
On June 8th, Alibaba announced the merger of the Tongyi Large Model Business Unit and the Future Life Laboratory to establish the Token Foundry Business Unit, which is directly managed by Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming.
This adjustment involves a batch of AI businesses. Zhou Jingren will serve as the Chief Scientist of Alibaba and lead the establishment of the Alibaba AI Future Research Institute, focusing on exploring and breaking through cutting-edge AI technologies. Zheng Bo led Happy Horse, Happy Oyster, and others to join the Token Foundry business unit.
Since Wu Yongming became the CEO of Alibaba, the company's emphasis on technology, especially AI, has continued to increase. It has not only invested in many emerging big model companies such as KIMI, Zhipu, and Minimax, but also continuously invested heavily in AI internally, with Wu Yongming leading the way.
In March 2026, Alibaba established the Token Hub business group and established a new organization with the core goal of "creating tokens, delivering tokens, and applying tokens", under the direct responsibility of Wu Yongming. Alibaba Token Hub includes Tongyi Laboratory, MaaS Business Line, Qianwen Business Unit, Wukong Business Unit, and AI Innovation Business Unit, covering a complete layout from basic model research and development, model service platform, to personal and enterprise AI applications.
Alibaba has established a Token Foundry business unit, and this upgrade is Alibaba's continuous increase in the AI field. The Token Foundry business unit is a parallel unit to the Qianwen business unit, Wukong business unit, and others.
Alibaba's latest Qwen-3.7 model has outstanding coding capabilities, achieving the top three in the world and the first in China. The Q4 financial report released last month revealed for the first time that Alibaba's AI business has crossed the initial investment stage and entered the commercial return cycle, with a positive response from the capital market.
Analysts pointed out that Zhou Jingren was one of the key figures in the construction of the Tongyi Big Model team from scratch and the establishment of the Qwen series as a leader in global models. He became a partner at Alibaba last year. Chief Scientist is the highest academic title in Alibaba's technology system, and this appointment is not only a high recognition of Zhou Jingren's contributions, but also a strategic deployment for the future.
