On the evening of November 15, Alibaba Group announced its new quarterly results. Alibaba Cloud's quarterly revenue was 29.61 billion yuan, up 7% year on year, compared with 26.549 billion yuan in the previous quarter, up 11.5% month on month. This is the fourth consecutive quarter that Alibaba Cloud has achieved a rise in growth rate. In the quarter, Alibaba Cloud's adjusted EBITA profit reached 2.661 billion yuan, an increase of 89% year over year, exceeding analysts' expectations of 2.493 billion yuan.

According to financial reports, Alibaba Cloud's overall revenue (excluding revenue from Alibaba's consolidated business) increased by more than 7% year-on-year, driven by double-digit growth in public cloud services, and increased adoption of AI-related products. Revenue from AI-related products achieved three-digit year-on-year growth for five consecutive quarters. In the future, Alibaba Cloud will continue to invest in customer growth and technology, especially artificial intelligence infrastructure, to drive AI's cloud computing penetration rate and consolidate Alibaba Cloud's market-leading position.

During the quarter, Alibaba Cloud's adjusted EBITA revenue increased 89% year over year to 2.661 billion yuan, compared to 1.409 billion yuan in the same period in 2023. According to financial reports, this increase was mainly due to Alibaba Cloud's product structure shifting to public cloud products with higher profit margins (including AI-related products) while continuing to improve operational efficiency, but the increase in profit was partly offset by continued investment in customer growth and technology.

This quarter, Tongyi Qianwen released Qwen2.5, a next-generation open source model. The flagship model Qwen2.5-72B surpassed the Llama 405B in performance and ascended to the top of the global open source model. As of September, the cumulative number of downloads of the Tongyi Qianwen open source model has exceeded 40 million, and the number of Qwen derivative models in the domestic and overseas open source community has exceeded 0.0743 million, making it the largest generative language model community in the world.

Following the first sharp price reduction in May, the three main models of Tongyi Qianwen on Alibaba Cloud's Bairen platform have been cut in price again. The price of Qwen-Turbo dropped by 85% to as low as 0.3 yuan per million tokens, and Qwen-Plus and Qwen-Max reduced prices by 80% and 50%, respectively. Among them, Qwen-Plus's reasoning ability is on par with GPT4 and can be applied to complex tasks. It is the best choice for the balance of effectiveness, speed and cost. After the price reduction, Qwen-Plus reached the highest cost performance ratio in the industry, and the same scale was 84% lower than the industry price.

At the September Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Cloud unveiled the newly upgraded AI Infra series of products and capabilities for the first time. At the infrastructure level, Alibaba Cloud launched the Panjiu AI server with maximum support for 16 cards on a single machine, CPFS file storage with a data throughput of 20 Tb/s, and HPN7.0, a high-performance network architecture that can support stable connections of more than 0.1 million GPUs. At the platform level, Alibaba Cloud ACS introduced GPU container computing power for the first time, improving computational affinity and performance through topology-aware scheduling. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud's artificial intelligence platform PAI has achieved 10,000 card-level integrated flexible scheduling of training and reasoning, and the effective utilization rate of AI computing power exceeds 90%.

In the past year, Alibaba Cloud's government and corporate affairs have entered a healthy path. In order to meet the “cloud+AI” collaborative development needs of government and enterprise customers, Alibaba Cloud released the Feitian Enterprise Intelligent Computing Edition and Bailian Exclusive Edition 2.0 to achieve integrated, supercomputing, and intelligent computing network scheduling, management, operation and maintenance.

Alibaba Cloud is deeply involved in the construction of digital Chongqing. Through full-stack cloud capabilities, Alibaba Cloud helped build a “three-level digital city operation and governance center” system based on Alibaba Cloud's Chongqing Government Affairs Cloud; based on the Flying Sky Enterprise Edition, China Radio and Television used “one cloud multi-region” and “one cloud multi-core” architecture to build an operator-level cloud platform; and the National Astronomical Observatory and the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences successively released the astronomical model “Star Language 3.0” and the world's first “Big Moon Model”. Up to now, Alibaba Cloud has served more than 1,000 large government and enterprise customers, including 30+ ministries and directly subordinate units, 50+ urban brains, 800+ central state-owned enterprises, and received the 2024 Cloud Service Capability Leadership Quadrant for Central State-owned Enterprises.

At the same time, the AI boom is driving demand for AI computing, big data, storage, databases, etc., and the depth of enterprise cloud use has further increased. The big model Unicorn MiniMax and Dark Side of the Moon use Alibaba Cloud big data products to optimize model data preprocessing and retrieval; Xiaohongshu built the largest cloud data lake in Asia based on Alibaba Cloud; Haier Smart Home also built a new data platform foundation based on Alibaba Cloud to significantly improve data processing performance and efficiency; Alibaba Cloud combined self-developed cloud-native database products to strongly support typical scenarios such as large-scale online concurrency, large-scale archived data reading/writing and version updates, and game operation during peak gaming periods. Burger King's Chinese operating company TFI announced the closure of offline data centers and the migration of all business systems to Alibaba Cloud. The core system of Suntory (China) has been fully relocated to the Alibaba Cloud platform. Sinopec recently announced that all charging stations are running on Alibaba Cloud to achieve a “national network.”

As AI gradually penetrates into the physical world, the demand for large-scale intelligent computing power has exploded. As early as 2022, Xiaopeng Motor and Alibaba Cloud joined hands to build the largest autonomous driving intelligence center in China in Ulanqab, increasing model training efficiency by more than 600 times, and expanding computing power to 2.51 Eflops in the past two years, supporting rapid iteration of large models. OPPO and Skyworth have also joined the Tongyi Big Model one after another, driving the consumption of more resources on the cloud.

Up to now, Alibaba Cloud has established 85 availability zones in 29 regions around the world, making it the largest cloud service provider in China and the number one in the Asia-Pacific region.