Lingxi Games

Gaming · Private Equity · China Tech

Acquisition

Alibaba reportedly sells Lingxi Games to Trustar Capital for $1.5B+

The divestment underscores how aggressively Chinese tech giants are shedding profitable side businesses to bankroll a costly AI arms race.

• Alibaba has agreed to sell its wholly owned gaming studio Lingxi Games to Hong Kong-based private equity firm Trustar Capital, in a deal worth at least $1.5 billion according to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg.
• Guangzhou-based Lingxi Games is best known for "Three Kingdoms: Strategy Edition," a multiplayer strategy title co-developed with Japan's Koei Tecmo.
• Under the agreement Alibaba will transfer its entire stake in Lingxi to Trustar, and CEO Zhou Bingshu says he and the existing management team will keep running the studio.
• Reuters, citing a person familiar with the matter, put Alibaba's proceeds at more than $2 billion, half a billion above Bloomberg's $1.5 billion floor, underscoring how little of the deal's terms are actually confirmed.
• The sale follows Alibaba's late-2024 exits from hypermarket chain Sun Art and department-store operator Intime, which together raised $2.6 billion as part of CEO Eddie Wu's push to shed non-core businesses.
• Rival ByteDance sold its Moonton mobile-game studio to Saudi-backed Savvy Games Group for more than $6 billion in March, signaling a broader retreat by Chinese tech conglomerates from gaming as private equity and sovereign wealth funds step in.
• Giving up a proven, cash-generating business to redirect capital toward AI models and data centers shows just how central compute spending has become to Alibaba's strategic priorities, even at the cost of reliable revenue.