Can Alibaba Cloud Rewrite Itself?
Over the past five months, Alibaba Cloud's MaaS (Model as a Service) revenue has surged 15x, marking a strategic overhaul where the company is shifting its 17-year-old system designed for "humans using cloud" to a new paradigm centered on "Agents consuming Tokens."
At its recent summit, Alibaba Cloud announced a full-stack upgrade encompassing "chip-cloud-model-inference," all optimized for AI Agents. Key launches include the new AI product portal "QianWen Cloud," hyper-node servers powered by the in-house AI chip Zhenwu M890, and the latest flagship model, Qwen3.7-Max. Senior VP Liu Weiguang described this as building "China's largest AI factory," where chips are raw materials, the cloud is the workshop, models are machines, and the inference platform is the assembly line, with Tokens as the final product.
The company is now emphasizing its chip strategy, unveiling the Zhenwu M890 and a two-year roadmap for future chips. With over 560,000 chips deployed across 400+ clients, Alibaba Cloud aims to control the marginal cost per Token, mirroring Google's integration of TPU and Gemini for optimal cost-performance.
The cloud infrastructure itself is being rewritten. Traditional cloud interfaces are being transformed into standardized, Agent-callable Skills. A new scheduling logic focuses on "task scheduling" over "resource scheduling" to handle the unpredictable, elastic workloads of Agents. Liu noted that AI applications now automatically provision cloud resources, with one customer's daily automated provisioning equaling two weeks of manual work.
For models, the focus has shifted from conversational prowess to execution capability. Qwen3.7-Max demonstrated this by autonomously writing and optimizing a production-grade AI compute kernel for the new Zhenwu M890 chip over 35 hours, achieving a 10x performance improvement. The underlying Bailian platform was upgraded for efficiency, and it maintains an open ecosystem, hosting third-party models.
This restructuring extends beyond technology to sales, organization, and metrics. Alibaba Cloud has established dedicated MaaS sales teams, separated from traditional IaaS, with new KPIs focusing on high-quality Tokens that solve real problems, the number of core business systems integrated with models, and the efficiency of Agent task completion.
The underlying bet is clear: AI represents an opportunity orders of magnitude larger than before. Despite the uncertainty, Alibaba Cloud is aggressively rebuilding its entire system, betting on an AI-driven future where Tokens could become its largest product line.
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