Alibaba, one of the world’s leading tech giants, is gearing up to take its cloud intelligence group public. Seven weeks after announcing its own restructuring, the company’s Board of Directors approved a spin-off of the group, which will include external strategic investors. Alibaba will complete the spinoff within the next twelve months.
The Cloud Intelligence Group comprises of Alibaba’s Cloud, AI and Business Messenger Unit and is owned by Alibaba Group. The cloud computing business brings in a revenue of $2.7 billion, making up 9% of Alibaba’s total income. Alibaba Cloud has been ranked the third-largest infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud provider by Gartner and fourth-largest overall provider by Synergy Research Group.
The group also includes Alibaba’s Dingtalk, a popular messaging and productivity platform with 600 million users (23 million of which are enterprise users). In addition, Alibaba has been developing Tongyi Qianwen, a large language model and an alternative to GPT-3. The model has been integrated into Alibaba’s products, such as its Dingtalk copilot.
Alibaba is keen to reduce prices to make cloud computing more accessible and inexpensive, cutting the cost of its core utility products by up to 50%. Beijing has also introduced a draft policy calling for cloud providers to better collaborate with AI firms.
In regards to Alibaba, the company is one of the globe’s biggest tech firms, headquartered in Hangzhou, China. Along with its e-commerce services, the company offers cloud computing, data processing, artificial intelligence, and digital media services. Alibaba was initially public in New York back in 2014, and it later sought a secondary listing in Hong Kong amid rising tensions between the U.S. and China.
Daniel Zhang is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group and one of the Cloud Intelligence Group’s board of directors. Zhang has been in his current position since 2019, following Jack Ma’s retirement. Zhang has focused on further developing Alibaba’s corporate culture, and moreover, driving the company’s growth through cloud computing, AI, and increased automation.
