Alibaba $100 billion stock rally fueled by AI, Jack Ma return

In November 2023, Jack Ma posted an internal memo at Alibaba, urging the e-commerce giant he helped create to “correct its course.” The message was as a rallying cry by one of China’s most prominent tech leaders to a company going through one of the most tumultuous times in its history.

Alibaba’s share price was near record lows, growth was stalling amid intensifying competition, management changes were coming thick and fast, and Beijing was still closely scrutinizing the company. Ma himself was barely in the public view.

But his message may have instilled some new hope in Alibaba — the e-commerce giant is now seeing growth in its core business and has become one of the leading artificial intelligence players in China and globally, competing with the likes of OpenAI and DeepSeek. And Alibaba is now back in favor with the Chinese government.

Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares have quietly risen nearly 60% this year, adding more than $100 billion to the company’s valuation.

“China tech has awoken being led by Alibaba and investors globally are viewing this as the best way to way China tech … and we agree. Alibaba is in pole position to benefit from AI and cloud spend,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC.

CNBC spoke to Alibaba’s chairman as well as a former executive and analysts, who painted a picture of the changes at the tech firm that have led to the start of the company’s comeback.

Alibaba’s downfall was swift. Many have credited its beginning to comments made by Ma in October 2020 where he appeared to criticize China’s financial regulator.

The comments weren’t widely picked up on. Days later, Alibaba’s share price hit a record high with its market capitalization exceeding $858 billion.

Alibaba was riding wave of successes that had seen it grow into the biggest e-commerce player in China, with international expansion on the agenda and its cloud business growing quickly. To top it all off, Alibaba affiliate Ant Group was gearing up for an initial public offering that would raise north of $34 billion, making it the biggest listing in history.

Ant Group, which was also founded by Ma, is a financial technology company that is behind Alipay, one of China’s two most prominent mobile payment systems.

Just two days before Ant Group was scheduled to list in Shanghai and Hong Kong, the IPO was canceled. At the time, Ant cited changes in China’s “regulatory environment.”

What followed was several years of intense scrutiny on Ma’s empire and China’s biggest technology companies. Regulators clamped down on practices from giants that they viewed as anticompetitive, dished out billions of dollars of fines on companies including Alibaba, forced changes to Ant Group’s structure and brought in a plethora of rules touching…