Alibaba stock jumped roughly 11.85% on July 9, 2026, its biggest single-day move in about ten months, as investors bet that the company's aggressive push into AI and cloud is finally paying off. The man who ordered that push is Eddie Wu, the co-founder and engineer who took over as Alibaba Group's chief executive in September 2023 and has spent the time since quietly consolidating control over the company's most important businesses. Most retail investors trading BABA around $112.87 could not pick him out of a lineup, which is exactly how Wu has always operated.
Here is who Eddie Wu is, how he rose from Alibaba's first programmer to its corner office, and why the AI-and-cloud strategy he now owns is the reason the stock moved today.
Who Is Eddie Wu and How He Rose Through Alibaba
Eddie Wu, known in Chinese as Wu Yongming, is one of the 19 people who founded Alibaba in a Hangzhou apartment in 1999. He was the company's first programmer and its earliest technology director, the person who actually built the code behind the marketplace that Jack Ma was busy selling to the world. He is also a member of the Alibaba Partnership, the small group of senior insiders who nominate a majority of the board, which gives him structural influence far beyond the CEO title alone.
Wu graduated from the College of Information Engineering at Zhejiang University of Technology in 1996, then spent the next two decades moving through Alibaba's most sensitive technical jobs rather than its marketing ones. That background matters for how he runs the company now. When a founder-engineer looks at a business, the first question is usually how the technology could be rebuilt to do something new, and Wu has spent 2026 rebuilding Alibaba around inference and cloud rather than around gross merchandise volume. His official leadership profile on the Alibaba Group site reads more like an engineer's resume than an executive's, and that is the point.
From Founding Engineer to Chief Executive
Wu's career reads as a slow climb through Alibaba's technical spine, not a parachute drop into leadership. He held the CTO seat at both Alipay and Taobao before ever taking a group-wide role, which means he has personally run the payments rail and the e-commerce engine that still generate most of the cash he is now spending on AI.
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Year
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Role or milestone
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1999
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Co-founds Alibaba as its first programmer and technology director
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2004
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Becomes chief technology officer of Alipay
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2008
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Takes over as chief technology officer of Taobao
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2015
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Founds Vision Plus Capital, a technology-focused venture fund
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2023
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Named Alibaba Group CEO in September and hands over the cloud unit
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2026
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Consolidates e-commerce and cloud under an AI-first strategy
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The through-line is that Wu never left the technical side of the house. His stint founding Vision Plus Capital in 2015 also gave him a decade of experience writing checks into frontier technology and digital healthcare, the same instinct now visible in Alibaba's investments in Chinese model labs such as Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Zhipu AI. You can see that pattern in the way AI agents have moved from a research curiosity to a core product line at the company in under two years.
Why the September 2023 Transition Handed Him Real Power
The leadership change that installed Wu was not a simple retirement. In June 2023, Alibaba announced that co-founder Joseph Tsai would become chairman and Wu would become CEO, replacing Daniel Zhang, and the handover formally took effect in September 2023. Zhang was initially expected to keep running Alibaba Cloud, but within months Wu took direct control of the cloud unit himself, and he later added oversight of the core Taobao and Tmall commerce business as growth there stalled.
That sequence is the whole story. By pulling both the cloud division and the flagship e-commerce engine under his own office, Wu ended years of federated, semi-independent business units that often pulled in different directions. The reorganization Alibaba attempted in 2023 had split the company into six pieces meant to be spun off separately, and Wu effectively reversed the logic of that breakup by re-centering the two units that matter most for an AI strategy. Alibaba's own chairman and CEO succession announcement framed the change as a generational handover, but in practice it concentrated decision-making in one engineer who was willing to bet the balance sheet on a single idea.
Inside the AI and Cloud First Strategy
Wu's thesis is blunt. Alibaba should stop thinking of itself primarily as a retailer and start thinking of itself as the AI and cloud infrastructure layer for a huge share of the Chinese economy. The financial evidence that the bet is working showed up in the most recent quarter, where Alibaba Cloud Intelligence revenue grew about 38% year over year, and AI-related product revenue reached roughly 30% of external cloud revenue after a long run of triple-digit growth in that segment.
The commercial engine underneath those numbers is the Qwen family of open models, which Alibaba has pushed into Taobao, Tmall, and its enterprise cloud so that customers rent inference the same way they once rented storage. Wu has told analysts he wants combined external cloud and AI revenue to pass 100 billion dollars over the next five years, a target that only makes sense if Alibaba keeps spending heavily on the same accelerated computing that drives demand for Nvidia's data-center chips and puts it in direct competition with the hyperscale cloud model that lifted names like Oracle. The strategy is capital-intensive and it has squeezed near-term margins, which is the honest counterweight to the bull case. Investors spent much of 2025 punishing that spending, and only in 2026 have they started to treat it as an asset rather than a drain, a shift the South China Morning Post tied to strong AI revenue and Alibaba's in-house T-Head chips.
Why Eddie Wu Matters Now
The July 9 rally is the market re-rating Wu's plan in real time. Ahead of earnings, traders concluded that Alibaba's AI and cloud business is compounding fast enough to offset the profit pressure from all the spending, and the stock posted its biggest gain in roughly ten months. For anyone holding BABA, the person to watch is not a product launch or a single quarter but Wu himself, because the entire investment case now rests on the accuracy of one engineer's capital-allocation call.
His approach places him alongside a small group of technical leaders who reshaped large companies around AI infrastructure rather than around their legacy products, a path that invites comparison with executives like Broadcom's Hock Tan and his AI infrastructure bet. It also puts him in the same conversation as the researchers and forecasters arguing that AI capability is scaling faster than most institutions expect, a thesis laid out by figures such as Leopold Aschenbrenner. Wu is the rare case of someone who both believes that thesis and controls the cash flows to act on it at scale, and that combination is why his name deserves attention from crypto and equity traders who normally ignore Chinese tech management.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the CEO of Alibaba?
Eddie Wu, whose Chinese name is Wu Yongming, has been the chief executive of Alibaba Group since September 2023. He is a co-founder of the company, was its first programmer in 1999, and is a member of the Alibaba Partnership.
When did Eddie Wu become Alibaba's CEO?
Wu was named CEO in the June 2023 succession announcement, and the change took effect in September 2023 when he replaced Daniel Zhang. He later took direct control of Alibaba Cloud and the core Taobao and Tmall e-commerce business.
What is Eddie Wu's AI strategy for Alibaba?
Wu is reorienting Alibaba around AI and cloud infrastructure rather than pure e-commerce, backed by heavy capital spending and the Qwen model family. He has set a target of surpassing 100 billion dollars in combined external cloud and AI revenue over five years.
Why did Alibaba stock jump in 2026?
BABA rose about 11.85% on July 9, 2026, its biggest one-day move in roughly ten months, as investors grew more confident that Alibaba's AI and cloud growth would outweigh the near-term profit squeeze from its spending. Cloud Intelligence revenue grew about 38% and AI product revenue reached roughly 30% of external cloud revenue.
The Bottom Line
Eddie Wu is the founder-engineer who bet Alibaba's future on AI and cloud, and the market spent July 9, 2026 deciding he might be right. The numbers that matter going forward are the trajectory of that 38% cloud growth rate, the path of AI product revenue as it pushes past 30% of external cloud sales, and how the 100 billion dollar five-year target looks against reality at the next earnings print. If cloud growth holds and margins stabilize, the consolidation Wu engineered since September 2023 becomes the setup for a genuine re-rating. If the spending keeps outrunning the payoff, the same concentration of power turns into a single point of failure, and that is the trade every BABA holder is now making.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.
