Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴) wants to be an AI "shovel seller" — Wu Yongming leads Alibaba Token Hub (ATH), Wukong division (悟空事业部) debuts

A new hub for tokens and models

Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴) has formally created the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH)事业群 and placed it directly under CEO Wu Yongming (吴泳铭), it has been reported that the move is meant to turn the company into an infrastructure provider for the AI era — a modern-day "shovel seller." ATH will sit alongside Alibaba Cloud and the e‑commerce group, reflecting a major organizational bet to centralise model development, platform services and application teams around token and compute supply rather than just user traffic.

What ATH combines — and why Wukong matters

ATH reportedly folds together Tongyi Lab (通义实验室), the MaaS model‑service line, the Qianwen (千问) consumer assistant, a new Wukong division (悟空事业部) focused on B‑side AI‑native work platforms, and an AI innovation unit. Tongyi will drive multimodal model creation; MaaS will build an open, efficient model serving stack; Wukong aims to embed model capabilities deep into enterprise workflows — tightly coupling with DingTalk (钉钉), which already serves over 700 million users. Why the emphasis on enterprise? Because agents that do work for you, not just chat, are where commercial value will concentrate.

Token surge, rising costs, and geopolitical pressure

The background is clear: agent tools such as OpenClaw (小龙虾) have driven token consumption into the stratosphere, and IDC data cited by industry sources projects explosive agent growth and token demand in China through 2031. That demand is already driving up cloud and model service prices — AWS, Google and model vendors like OpenAI have raised fees — and it has been reported that Chinese providers are seeing similar adjustments. Against this backdrop and amid U.S. export controls on advanced chips and broader trade frictions, domestic players are racing to build an end‑to‑end stack from models to compute to apps. Can Alibaba turn token supply and orchestration into a durable competitive moat? The ATH experiment is the company's answer to that question.