Alibaba Consolidates AI Divisions to Power the Agent Economy

Alibaba has established a new business group dedicated to artificial intelligence.

The new Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) Business Group is led by Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu, the company said in a Monday (March 16) press release.

The unit brings together Tongyi Laboratory, which builds multimodal foundation models; MaaS Business Line, which builds technical infrastructure for AI; Qwen Business Unit, which builds a personal AI assistant; Wukong Business Unit, which is a newly created unit focused on building an AI-native work platform for enterprises; and AI Innovation Business Unit, which explores new AI applications, according to the release.

ATH will seize the opportunity presented by AI agents powered by tokens, which are set to take on a growing share of digital work, Wu said in an internal announcement letter that was shared in the release.

The unit is named after the tokens generated by AI models. Wu said in the letter: “ATH is built around a single organizing mission: create tokens, deliver tokens and apply tokens.”

“I will lead ATH directly, with a mandate to drive strategic coordination across our AI businesses, embed AI deeply into how we work, and preserve the agility that lets us move fast,” Wu said.

Alibaba said in August 2025 that it is “embarking on a new chapter of entrepreneurship by investing in two strategic pillars of consumption and AI + Cloud.”

The company said this in a presentation while reporting that its cloud division earned 26% year-over-year revenue growth, driven in part by its customers’ increasing adoption of AI-related products.

“During the quarter, AI-related revenue accounted for over 20% of revenue from external customers as AI demand continued to grow rapidly,” Wu said at the time during an earnings call. “We’re also seeing AI applications driving great growth momentum of traditional products, including compute and storage.”

Alibaba has introduced several new AI-related products in 2026, including a mobile app designed to help users install OpenClaw and use it to deploy AI agents; an artificial intelligence model designed to help robots grasp their physical surroundings and identify objects; and agentic and payments capabilities that enable is consumer-facing app to order food, complete in-chat payments, call and book travel, and call restaurants.

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