The Chinese giant is offloading a profitable gaming studio to private equity so it can pour every spare yuan into Qwen and its data centres, though the buyers and sellers cannot agree on what the studio is worth. Alibaba is selling its gaming subsidiary, Lingxi Games, to the Asian private-equity firm Trustar Capital, in a deal that neatly captures where the company’s priorities now lie. The games, it turns out, were never the point. The point is artificial intelligence, and everything else is now for sale to pay for it. The maths of the transaction is where things get slippery....