“AI is a challenge for rural education—but more importantly, it is an opportunity to return to the true essence of education.” On January 26, Jack Ma once again attended his annual “Laba Festival Reunion,” where he openly shared his latest reflections on artificial intelligence and education.
In Jack Ma’s view, education in the age of AI should not aim to produce a thousand students who all deliver the same “correct” answer. Instead, it should empower a thousand students to ask ten thousand meaningful and original questions.
Notably, his previous public remarks on AI came last April at Alibaba Cloud’s new fiscal year kickoff meeting, where he emphasized that cutting-edge technology should not only strive to conquer the stars, but also serve everyday life with warmth and humanity.
Behind Jack Ma’s discussion of AI lies Alibaba’s accelerating push into the AI sector. For Alibaba, 2025 marked a year of rapid momentum and bold expansion in AI.
After announcing a RMB 380 billion investment over three years into cloud and AI hardware infrastructure in February last year, Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group reported a 34% revenue increase in the third quarter. Revenue from AI-related products achieved triple-digit year-on-year growth for nine consecutive quarters.
That said, sustained investments in AI, instant retail, user experience, and large-scale technological upgrades have placed short-term pressure on Alibaba’s profitability in the first half of fiscal year 2026.
A key milestone arrived on January 29, when Pingtouge—Alibaba’s wholly owned semiconductor arm—unveiled its self-developed AI chip, the “Zhenwu 810E.” With performance comparable to Nvidia’s H20, the chip made a striking debut and drew widespread attention.
This launch signaled the full emergence of Alibaba’s “golden AI triangle,” formed by Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Cloud, and Pingtouge—often referred to internally as “Tong-Cloud-Chip.” As a result, Alibaba became the world’s second technology company, after Google, to possess full-stack self-developed capabilities spanning large models, cloud computing, and AI chips.
Meanwhile, the 2025 Hurun Rich List, released last October, showed Jack Ma and his family with an estimated wealth of RMB 210 billion—up 27% year-on-year—ranking 11th overall.
Returning to the “Laba Festival Reunion,” Jack Ma revisits AI and education
The “Laba Festival Reunion” is an annual event held on the traditional Laba Festival as part of Jack Ma’s Rural Teachers Initiative, designed to recognize outstanding rural educators and deepen long-term educational philanthropy.
Launched in 2015 by the Jack Ma Foundation, the Rural Teachers Initiative was the foundation’s first major public-facing program. Its mission is to improve the quality of rural education through financial support and professional training.
Each year, 100 outstanding rural teachers are selected, with each receiving RMB 100,000 in funding along with three years of continuous professional development support.
According to public records, the Jack Ma Foundation—established in 2014—invests tens of millions of yuan annually into the initiative, with funding reaching RMB 12.22 million in 2023 alone.
This year marked the 11th Laba Festival Reunion, with the program having supported a total of 1,101 rural teachers to date.
Beyond congratulating the newly selected teachers, Jack Ma addressed a central concern raised by many educators: in the age of AI, will rural education be left behind?
His response was clear. “AI presents a challenge to rural education, but it is also an opportunity to return to the core of education. In the AI era, the question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to teach our children to use it well.”
“With AI, education should no longer train children to compete with machines in calculation and memorization,” he added. “Instead, it should help them preserve curiosity—because curiosity is the true source of computing power.”
In Jack Ma’s view, the real divide in the AI era is not a technological gap, but a gap in curiosity, imagination, creativity, judgment, and collaboration.
He stressed that future education should not focus on making children memorize more, but on encouraging them to think in more interesting, creative, and distinctive ways.
Most pointedly, he noted, “Education in the AI era is not about producing a thousand students with the same correct answer—it’s about teaching a thousand students to ask ten thousand great questions.”
Seven years after “retirement,” a renewed focus on Alibaba’s AI journey
As the AI era accelerates, Jack Ma—who announced his retirement in 2019 and gradually stepped away from the public spotlight—has become increasingly visible once again.
Over the past seven years, leadership at Alibaba transitioned smoothly from Daniel Zhang to Joseph Tsai and Eddie Wu. Alongside this leadership renewal, Alibaba has doubled down on its commitment to cloud computing and AI beyond its traditional e-commerce roots.
In September 2023, newly appointed CEO Eddie Wu outlined two core strategies—“user first” and “AI-driven”—marking the first time AI was elevated to a central strategic position within Alibaba and signaling a full shift toward AI-led transformation.
That November, Jack Ma made a rare internal appearance on Alibaba’s intranet, commenting on e-commerce trends and noting that the AI-powered commerce era had only just begun—bringing both opportunities and challenges for everyone.
In April 2024, marking one year since Alibaba’s restructuring, Jack Ma published an internal essay titled “To Reform, To Innovate,” praising the new leadership’s courage and reaffirming support for continued transformation. It was his most extensive reflection on Alibaba’s future in five years.
Later that year, during Alibaba’s 25th anniversary, he again emphasized the importance of staying grounded amid intense competition and rapid AI-driven change.
At the April 2025 Alibaba Cloud fiscal kickoff, Jack Ma reiterated that high technology should not replace humanity, but understand and serve it better—bringing dignity and meaningful change to everyday lives.
Short-term profit pressure, long-term AI momentum
As global enthusiasm for AI intensified throughout 2025, Alibaba continued to expand aggressively in the field.
In February, Eddie Wu stated that AI’s growth had far exceeded expectations and reaffirmed Alibaba’s commitment to accelerating cloud and AI infrastructure development.
At the September Cloud Conference, he went further, stating that Alibaba Cloud’s ultimate goal is to develop artificial superintelligence (ASI) capable of self-iteration and surpassing human intelligence.
To support this vision, Alibaba reaffirmed its RMB 380 billion, three-year infrastructure investment plan, noting that by 2032, its global data center energy consumption could be ten times that of 2022.
These investments were reflected clearly in financial results. In the first half of fiscal year 2026, Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group reported RMB 73.22 billion in revenue, up 30% year-on-year, accounting for roughly 15% of total group revenue.
Adjusted EBITA rose 31% to RMB 6.56 billion, making it one of the few segments delivering positive growth, driven by revenue expansion and improved operating efficiency.
In the third quarter alone, cloud revenue grew 34%, with AI-related product revenue posting triple-digit growth for the ninth consecutive quarter.
However, heavy investments in instant retail, user experience, and technology weighed on near-term profitability. Operating profit fell 43% year-on-year in the first half of fiscal 2026, while net profit attributable to shareholders declined 6%.
Completing the full-stack AI puzzle
Entering 2026, Alibaba delivered a rapid series of AI breakthroughs.
On January 15, the Qwen app was upgraded to integrate with Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy, Amap, and other ecosystem services—allowing users to shop, order food, and book travel through AI.
On January 27, Alibaba released its flagship reasoning model, Qwen3-Max-Thinking, with over one trillion parameters and 36 trillion training tokens—placing it among the world’s most powerful reasoning models.
Just two days later, Pingtouge unveiled the Zhenwu 810E AI chip, which has already been deployed across large-scale cloud clusters serving more than 400 customers.
Industry observers believe Alibaba and Google are uniquely positioned to lead AI development due to their end-to-end capabilities—from chips and cloud platforms to large models and applications.
In his 2026 annual letter to employees, Eddie Wu reaffirmed Alibaba’s all-in commitment to AI, emphasizing that AI is reshaping consumption patterns and global structures at unprecedented speed.
“These achievements are not isolated wins,” he wrote. “They are the result of ecosystem-wide collaboration—and they show that AI is not about replacement, but about upgrading and unlocking new possibilities.”
As AI becomes ever more intertwined with daily life and work, whether Alibaba’s bold bet on AI will deliver further breakthroughs remains a story worth watching.
