Jack Ma, Chairman of the Alibaba Group, recently attended the Italian international technology and investment event Wave by Vento 2026 and expressed his views, stating that AI will evolve from an explicit topic into an implicit infrastructure integrated into various businesses over the next five years.
According to Jack Ma, current AI technologies are more adept at helping humans "save time," while there is still significant potential for breakthroughs in "spending time." Among these, enhancing the productivity of knowledge workers is the most certain application scenario, with an estimated total addressable market (TAM) of 50 trillion dollars. At the same time, AI will also accelerate innovation in the fields of healthcare and scientific research.
Regarding industrial chain and business layout, Jack Ma divided Alibaba's development into two stages: the "Before Christ" (BC) and "After Death" (AD) periods, with 2023 as the dividing line. He clearly defined e-commerce and full-stack AI as core directions and is advancing the full-stack AI strategy comprehensively from computing power, models, and application layers.
When discussing the momentum of China's AI competition, he mentioned that China has about 30% of the world's industrial production volume. The high-value manufacturing data accumulated in factories, as well as the complete hardware supply chains in areas such as electric vehicles and robotics, will become significant advantages during the stage when AI deeply integrates with the physical world. At the same time, Jack Ma reiterated the key value of open-source philosophy, believing that the open-source approach is bringing development opportunities to European "Neo Cloud" companies. European industries can combine local computing infrastructure with open-source model optimization to improve operations.
In the current era of intertwined technological innovation and uncertainty, the AI industry is on the verge of full-stack and ubiquitous implementation. Jack Ma's exposition on the full-stack AI strategy and open-source ecosystem not only clarifies the company's development path in the new era of intelligence but also provides important references for global industries to rely on software and hardware integration and pragmatic transnational cooperation.
