Alibaba Group — AI supply-chain exposure

Alibaba is one of the few companies present across several layers of the stack at once. Alibaba Cloud is China's leading hyperscaler, renting the compute that trains and serves models; its Qwen family is a widely used open-weights model line; and through its T-Head unit it designs its own silicon. That vertical spread — cloud, models, and chips under one roof — is rare outside the largest US players.

Its structural hook is being the default AI platform inside China's walled market, where domestic cloud and open models substitute for restricted foreign supply. Qwen's open weights give it distribution and mindshare well beyond its own datacenters, while T-Head's ASIC work is a hedge against constrained access to leading-edge accelerators. The model places it at diversified mid-centrality: exposed to every layer but bottleneck-owner of none, with its real leverage the closed ecosystem it anchors rather than any single part.