Joe Tsai

Joseph Tsai (born 1964 in Taiwan) left a lucrative private-equity career in 1999 to become Jack Ma’s co-founder and dealmaker at Alibaba, structuring the company that became China’s e-commerce colossus. A Yale-educated lawyer and owner of the Brooklyn Nets, he took over as Alibaba’s chairman in September 2023 with a mandate to steady the giant — and chose AI as the way to do it.

All in on AI, allergic to froth

Under Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu, Alibaba declared AGI its primary objective, committed more than $50 billion (380 billion yuan) over three years to AI and cloud infrastructure, and open-sourced its Qwen model family, which became among the world’s most downloaded. At CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE in March 2025 Tsai sized the opportunity in trillions — arguing that if AI enhances even 20 percent of global labor, the addressable market exceeds the entire tech sector — while cheerfully noting that “mundane research” jobs like equity analysis could be automated outright.

Days later, at the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong, he delivered the boom’s most quoted warning from inside the industry: US datacenter spending looked like the start of a bubble, with capacity built “on spec” ahead of any demonstrated demand. The juxtaposition drew accusations of talking his book — deflating rivals’ spending while Alibaba ramped its own — but Tsai’s distinction was consistent: Alibaba builds against measurable demand from its cloud customers, not against projections.