Eddie Wu

Eddie Wu Yongming is the chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, one of the handful of companies whose cloud infrastructure, e-commerce transaction records and logistics networks make it a custodian of data at genuinely planetary scale. A co-founder of Alibaba who was among the eighteen original employees to build the company alongside Jack Ma, Wu studied at Zhejiang University of Technology before helping shape the technical backbone of Alibaba's early platforms, including Taobao.

Wu spent much of his career leading Alibaba's core technology and search functions, giving him deep familiarity with the data systems underpinning the group's e-commerce, payments and logistics businesses long before he reached the top job. He was appointed CEO of Alibaba Group in September 2023, succeeding Daniel Zhang, at a moment when the company faced intensifying competition from domestic rivals and a global race to build large-scale AI infrastructure.

Since taking charge, Wu has committed Alibaba to a sweeping 'AI-driven, user-first' strategy, redirecting enormous capital expenditure, reportedly on the order of tens of billions of yuan within his first fifteen months alone, into AI infrastructure and Alibaba Cloud's data-centre build-out. He personally leads the group's newly formed AI model development task force and the internal 'Token Hub' coordinating compute and model resources across Alibaba's businesses, and has backed external AI labs including Moonshot AI and Zhipu AI.

Under Wu, Alibaba Cloud has pushed its Qwen family of large language models as an open and increasingly widely adopted alternative in the global AI ecosystem, while Alibaba's retail and logistics arms continue to generate one of the densest consumer and merchant data sets anywhere in the world. Wu has framed this data, combined with Alibaba's compute infrastructure, as the foundation for the company's next decade of growth.

Wu's influence stems from controlling the commercial and cloud infrastructure through which hundreds of millions of consumers and merchants generate, store and increasingly have their data processed by AI systems. As Alibaba doubles down on AI, Wu sits at the centre of decisions about how one of the world's largest data platforms is built, secured and monetised.