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 many areas of technology.

In March 2023, Alibaba — a sprawling company that does everything from food delivery to cloud computing and movies — decided to split into six separate business groups, each with the ability to raise outside funding and go public. Alibaba thought the move would make these units more agile.

Then came a leadership reshuffle. Alibaba announced in June 2023 that Daniel Zhang, who had been CEO since 2015 and chairman from 2019, would step down from both roles to focus on the cloud business. But just three months later, Zhang suddenly quit the cloud unit.

Eddie Wu, a co-founder of Alibaba, took over as CEO and the head of cloud. Joe Tsai, another co-founder, stepped up to take on the role of chairman.

That was one of the most tumultuous times in Alibaba’s history.

“During that time period a great sense of uncertainty and confusion hovered over employees. While there was a wait-and-see sort of mentality that set in, the problem was that as time passed, many didn’t know just how long that would be,” Brian Wong, a former Alibaba executive and author of “The Tao of Alibaba,” told CNBC.

“While China’s economy during the start of Covid initially remained robust, following the lock-downs everything turned and the combination of disrupted supply chains and changes in the economic climate only compounded the concerns of where all of this was headed.”

“Large companies move very slow and it’s because the decision-making structure is too complicated … So we really needed to get back to nimbleness and act fast,” Tsai said at the CNBC CONVERGE LIVE event in Singapore earlier this month, adding that quick decision-making is key to competing with startup rivals.

Tsai said that he and Wu decided the first thing they needed to do was to “streamline the company.”

“Instead of talking about Alibaba as six different business units, we talked about ourselves as having two core businesses — e-commerce and cloud computing,” Tsai said.

“That simplified everything and our communication. It’s very important that we communicate that to our employees. They need to have a simple structure in their minds in order to move faster.”

Younger people in management were also given the power to make decisions, Tsai said.

“It means that actually letting them make some decisions and letting them make mistakes and train them so that they can recover from mistakes,” Tsai added.

Wu and Tsai also scrapped plans to list Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics arm, marking a U-turn on previous commitments.

“Eddie is winning plaudits internally for having trimmed the old and built the new. Jack [Ma] and Joe [Tsai] ultimately made the decision to bet on him and it’s paying off,” Duncan Clark, an early advisor to Alibaba and chairman of BDA, told CNBC by email.

The tightening of regulation and government scrutiny also hit investment. Billions of dollars were wiped off the value of Chinese tech companies while venture capital investment in startups plunged.

In a country where government policy and support is key for sectors and companies, Beijing’s apparent antagonism toward private business had dampened spirits in the tech sector. But as China continues to face economic headwinds, the role of the technology sector in boosting the economy is back in focus.

And in February this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a rare meeting with entrepreneurs urging them to “show their talents,” in comments seen as giving support to private businesses.

Alibaba’s Ma, among other top Chinese CEOs and founders, were present at that gathering. Ma’s attendance was particularly interesting, given that his empire was under the microscope over the last few years and he had not been seen with China’s political elite for some time.

“Xi’s meeting with Jack Ma also sent out a very clear signal on where the Chinese government’s priorities are at the moment – AI development and the growth of private enterprises are clearly important to China’s economic growth, and we also believe that Alibaba has the support of the Chinese authorities,” Chelsey Tam, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC by email.

The meeting has helped Alibaba’s share price this year. And it appears to have also instilled new confidence in Alibaba to hire and invest.

“It gave us the confidence … to put our earnings back into capex [capital expenditure] and investments and also hire people,” Alibaba’s Tsai said, referencing a more than $50 billion investment in AI infrastructure over the next three years that the company announced in February.

Alibaba is among China’s leaders, and in 2023, not long after ChatGPT made a splash, the company launched its first AI model called Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen. The Hangzhou-headquartered company has since aggressively launched numerous models that allow tasks such as video, text and image generation from user prompts.

Alibaba has made its models open source, meaning anyone can download them and build upon them. This has been key to its success. Some of the most popular models on Hugging Face, a global repository of AI models, are built on Qwen.

“Alibaba has been consistently releasing high-impact open source models on Hugging Face since early 2023,” Tiezhen Wang, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, told CNBC.

Wang said Alibaba’s models, which cover features like video, image and text generation, “deliver strong performance across tasks.”

While Alibaba was early in the AI model game, it was the release of a research paper from Chinese firm DeepSeek this year that forced all eyes to focus on what was going on in China. DeepSeek claimed its AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips, leading to a global stock sell-off.

“DeepSeek was a wake up call that China tech is not just sitting idle on AI and this indirectly benefits Alibaba as the appetite for AI is clear in China,” Wedbush Securities’ Ives said.

Alibaba’s cloud computing business posted accelerated growth in the December quarter from the quarter before.

“The key I think now is that rather than viewing Alibaba as a losing market share [and] margin e-commerce company it can now be seen as a large cloud [and] AI company benefiting from all the new opportunities,” BDA’s Clark said.

“It’s a complete change in narrative.”

CoreWeave on Thursday priced shares at $40 in the company’s IPO, raising $1.5 billion in the biggest U.S. tech offering since 2021, CNBC has confirmed.

The company, which provides access to Nvidia graphics processing units for artificial intelligence training and workloads, had planned to sell shares for between $47 and $55 each. At the top end of the range, that would’ve valued CoreWeave at about $26.5 billion, based on Class A and Class B shares outstanding.

The offering is down from 49 million shares to 37.5 million, according to a source familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the announcement hasn’t been made public yet. Bloomberg was first to report on the $40 price. At that level, CoreWeave’s valuation will be closer to $19 billion, though the market cap will be higher on a fully diluted basis.

Earlier on Thursday, CNBC reported that Nvidia, one of CoreWeave’s largest shareholders, was targeting a $250 million order at $40 per share.

CoreWeave’s shares are set to start trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker symbol “CRWV.”

The IPO is a major test for tech startups and the venture capital market after an extended lull in new offerings dating back to the beginning of 2022, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. Other tech-related companies that have filed to go public in recent weeks include digital health startup Hinge Health, online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that chat app maker Discord is working on an IPO.

The last venture-backed tech company that raised at least $1 billion for a U.S. IPO was Freshworks in 2021. Last year Reddit and Rubrik each raised about $750 million in their offerings.

After Donald Trump’s election victory in November, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said he expected renewed IPO activity, but President Trump’s imposition of tariffs in recent weeks added uncertainty to economic forecasts and led to increased volatility to tech stocks.

CoreWeave counts Microsoft as its biggest customer by far. Other clients include Meta, IBM and Cohere. Revenue soared more than 700% last year to almost $2 billion, but the company recorded a net loss of $863 million. CoreWeave’s model is capital intensive, requiring hefty purchases of equipment and expenditures on real estate.

A week after filing to go public, CoreWeave announced a contract with OpenAI worth up to $11.9 billion over five years. OpenAI agreed to buy $350 million in CoreWeave stock as part of the deal.

CoreWeave is trying to compete with some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the three leading providers of public cloud infrastructure in the U.S.

WATCH: Nvidia will anchor CoreWeave deal at $40 per share with a $250 million order, sources say

Shares of AppLovin sank 20% on Thursday, their steepest drop on record, as another short-selling firm raised concerns about the company’s digital ad technology and claimed that it’s violating app store rules.

AppLovin tumbled $65.92 to close at $261.70. The stock soared more than 700% last year, the biggest gain among U.S. tech companies, due to enthusiasm surrounding AppLovin’s artificial intelligence technology and the growth it was spurring in its ad business.

But Muddy Waters Research on Thursday became the third short-selling firm to publish a report meant to raise significant investor skepticism. The stock is down 19% in 2025 after Thursday’s drop.

The report said that AppLovin’s ad tactics “systematically” violate app stores’ terms of service by “impermissibly extracting proprietary IDs from Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Google, and others.” In so doing, AppLovin is funneling targeted ads to users without their consent, Muddy Waters said.

“If APP is not deplatformed, logically, numerous competitors will start copying APP’s techniques because there is little technology involved,” the firm wrote.

Last month, Fuzzy Panda Research was one of two firms, along with short-seller Culper Research, that critiqued AppLovin’s AXON software, which drove its earnings growth and stock surge. The shares dropped 12% on Feb. 26, the day of the short reports. Earlier in February, AppLovin reported a revenue and earnings beat.

After the short reports were published last month, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi wrote a blog post, defending his company’s technology and practices, and taking aim at the short sellers trying to profit from AppLovin’s decline.

An AppLovin spokesperson didn’t provide a comment on Thursday, referring CNBC to Foroughi’s post.

“It’s disappointing that a few nefarious short-sellers are making false and misleading claims aimed at undermining our success, and driving down our stock price for their own financial gain, rather than acknowledging the sophisticated AI models our team has built to enhance advertising for our partners,” Foroughi wrote. “It’s also noteworthy that the short reports emerged after our earnings report, where we would be in a period of being unable to respond with financial performance.”

Earlier this month, Fuzzy Panda penned a letter to the S&P 500 inclusion committee reiterating its claims of fraudulent ad tactics and alleging that AppLovin didn’t meet the committee’s “gold standard.” The firm encouraged the committee to keep AppLovin out of the S&P 500.

“AppLovin’s recent revenue growth has been based in data theft, revenue fraud, and the exploitation of our country’s laws protecting children,” the firm wrote to the S&P committee.

One of Muddy Waters’ central claims is that e-commerce advertisers are bailing on AppLovin. The firm said that it analyzed 776 advertisers active early in the first quarter and noted that the churn rate was about 23%, while Foroughi “reportedly claims there has been no churn,” according to the report.

Muddy Waters said it conducted the churn analysis by looking at e-commerce websites that, on Jan. 3, had AppLovin’s AXON pixel. The firm then re-ran those checks from March 24-26, and said it found 21 sites with “broken links,” and another 171 that no longer contained the pixel.

The 23% “churn rate is based only on those customers who removed the pixel,” the firm wrote.

A representative for Muddy Waters declined to comment.

WATCH: AppLovin shares down after Muddy Waters short