Cover Story: Alibaba Fights Tencent for Dominance Over AI in China

The world watched in February as a new name surged onto the global AI stage: DeepSeek. The Chinese startup, practically unknown weeks earlier, suddenly found itself the talk of Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun alike — and its 34-year-old founder, Liang Wenfeng, seated beside Tencent’s Pony Ma and Alibaba’s Jack Ma at a high-level private sector entrepreneurs’ roundtable with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.