Alibaba Group has established a new business unit called Token Foundry as part of the company’s restructuring plan to strengthen its efforts in artificial intelligence (AI), Seeking Alpha reported on Monday (June 8).
Token Foundry will combine Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab and Future Life business units. It will operate under the company’s recently established Alibaba Token Hub. According to reports, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu will take the lead.
Alibaba Group did not immediately respond to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
Alibaba Token Hub, a business group operated by Token Foundry, focuses on the creation, distribution, and application of AI tokens, as well as overseeing Alibaba’s as-a-service model, Qwen applications, and enterprise AI products, the report said.
According to the report, Alibaba has also established an AI Future Research Institute.
Wu said on an earnings call in May that AI is a growing proportion of Alibaba Group’s revenue and that the technology will benefit from the significant investments the company is making in AI infrastructure.
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Revenue from AI-related products currently accounts for 30% of Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence Group’s revenue and will account for more than 50% within about a year, Wu said.
“We are at a pivotal inflection point in the evolution from conversational chatbots to autonomous AI agents, which is directly driving explosive growth across three major workload categories: training, inference, and agent orchestration,” said Wu. “Against this background, Alibaba’s AI has moved beyond the initial investment stage to large-scale commercialization.”
Alibaba announced the establishment of Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) in March and said the business unit would include Tongyi Laboratory, which will build multimodal infrastructure models. MaaS business line that builds AI technology infrastructure. The Qwen business unit develops personal AI assistants. AI Innovation Business Unit exploring new AI applications. and a newly formed business unit called the Wukong business unit focused on building AI-native work platforms for enterprises.
“I will directly lead ATH and be tasked with driving strategic alignment across our AI business, deeply embedding AI into the way we work, and maintaining the agility that enables us to move quickly,” Wu said at the time.
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