{"id":5506,"date":"2026-08-18T17:13:57","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T17:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5506"},"modified":"2026-08-18T17:13:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T17:13:57","slug":"alibabas-2-billion-gaming-exit-signals-where-beijing-wants-its-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5506","title":{"rendered":"Alibaba\u2019s $2 billion gaming exit signals where Beijing wants its money"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Alibaba has agreed to sell Lingxi Games, the studio behind the mobile hit Three Kingdoms: Strategy Edition<\/em>, to private-equity firm Trustar Capital, Bloomberg<\/em> reported. While the studio is reportedly valued between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, the companies have not publicly disclosed a price.<\/p>\n

Read more A dropout living in a trailer, he got $1 million from Peter Thiel at 19\u2014now he\u2019s a billionaire who says the American Dream isn\u2019t dead<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAlibaba is handing Lingxi to Trustar due to better focus on its strategic priorities,\u201d Lingxi CEO Zhou Bingshu wrote in an internal staff memo according to Reuters<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Some of those strategic priorities for Alibaba include AI and cloud computing, which currently sit at the center of Beijing\u2019s economic strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just cleaning up the cap table,\u201d Rui Ma, a China tech analyst and founder of China-focused research platform Tech Buzz China, told Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In February last year, Alibaba pledged about $53 billion over three years on AI and cloud infrastructure, more than it spent on those areas over the previous decade. In May, CEO Eddie Wu told analysts the company would likely exceed that figure thank to increased data center buildout costs. The company is targeting $100 billion in AI revenue by 2031.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alibaba\u2019s sprawling strategy made more sense when its dominant e-commerce business was throwing off enough cash to fund bets across a wide range of industries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s just purely them executing on their plan of cleaning up non-core assets, making returns higher,\u201d Ma said.<\/p>\n

But domestic competition from companies including Pinduoduo and Meituan changed that equation.<\/p>\n

Read more \u2018The negotiations are very intense and delicate\u2019: Carney, Trump hold crunch talks to avoid midnight 50% tariff deadline<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cThey couldn\u2019t just kind of ride the cash flow from e-commerce and then just invest in whatever is interesting,\u201d she said. \u201cThey had to really focus.\u201d Ma described Lingxi as a remnant of an earlier Alibaba that tried to put \u201cmany pieces on the board.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Gaming was also never one of Alibaba\u2019s strongest businesses, according to Ma, with rival Tencent being a global gaming powerhouse\u2014but AI offers a different proposition.<\/p>\n

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Alibaba entered the AI boom with one of China\u2019s leading cloud businesses already in place, giving it both the infrastructure needed to build AI products and a potential way to monetize them. Ma said Alibaba has maintained a strong position in Chinese cloud missing word while developing a credible model strategy, although competition remains fierce.<\/p>\n

The commercial logic is only part of the picture, according to Usha Haley, a professor at Wichita State University who has researched Chinese state support for domestic companies and testified before Congress.<\/p>\n

For Haley, strategic decisions by large Chinese companies cannot be neatly separated from Beijing\u2019s industrial priorities. Chinese companies, she said, have strong incentives to put resources into sectors the government has identified as strategically important like AI and cloud infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlibaba\u2013and this is all like all the private companies that we\u2019ve spoken to in our research\u2013it just has to see where government interests lie, and the government interests are clearly communicated,\u201d Haley told Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Alibaba\u2019s Qwen models have pushed the company into the global AI race. Users downloaded Qwen\u2019s open-weight models more than 3 billion times over the previous six months, putting Alibaba ahead of Meta and Google by that measure.<\/p>\n

Read more Reed Hastings says he learned why companies aren\u2019t families after laying off one-third of Netflix: \u2018You would never lay off two of your kids\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The e-commerce giant sells its gaming studio and pours $53 billion into AI as the US-China tech rivalry heats up<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china"],"yoast_head":"\nAlibaba\u2019s $2 billion gaming exit signals where Beijing wants its money - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5506\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Alibaba\u2019s $2 billion gaming exit signals where Beijing wants its money - 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