Alibaba's 2026 Plan: Cloud and AI commercialization to generate annual revenue exceeding $100 billion

On March 19, Alibaba Group announced its Q3 FY2026 (calendar year 2025 Q4) earnings. Revenue from Alibaba AI-related products has achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth for ten consecutive quarters. The self-developed GPU by Pingtouge, which made its first appearance in the financial report, has achieved large-scale mass production and successful commercialization. The simultaneous launch of “Qianwen” and “Wukong” highlights the latest results of their AI investments.

Facing the huge and long-term growth momentum of the AI market, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang announced during the earnings call that the group’s commercial AI strategy aims for: in the next five years, including MaaS (Model as a Service), cloud and AI commercialization annual revenue will surpass $100 billion.

New Breakthroughs in Full-Stack AI Deployment

Alibaba Cloud accelerates growth by 36%

The financial report shows that, excluding the revenue from the divested businesses of Intime and Goshop Retail, Alibaba’s revenue for the quarter increased by 9% year-over-year to 284.843 billion yuan. During this period, the “AI + Cloud” business segment performed strongly, becoming a new growth engine for Alibaba. In this quarter, Alibaba Cloud achieved revenue of 43.284 billion yuan, up 36% year-over-year. AI-related product revenue has maintained triple-digit growth for ten consecutive quarters.

“This quarter, Alibaba continued to invest heavily in AI and consumer sectors. AI is one of our main growth engines,” said Daniel Zhang.

During the earnings call, Daniel Zhang elaborated on Alibaba’s full-stack AI deployment—building AI infrastructure with chips and cloud computing; with Token Hub as the main line, comprising large models, MaaS services, and “ToB + ToC” applications, forming a complete capability from AI Infrastructure to applications.

Driven by persistent strong demand for AI, Alibaba Cloud’s external commercial revenue grew 35% year-over-year this quarter. The self-developed GPU by Pingtouge, which made its debut in the financial report, has achieved large-scale mass production. It supports Alibaba’s internal business and has also been commercialized.

According to Daniel Zhang, as of February 2026, Pingtouge has delivered a total of 470,000 chips. Over 60% of Pingtouge chips are used for external commercial clients, with scaled AI task adaptation for external customers, supporting AI tasks for over 400 enterprises across industries such as internet, finance, and autonomous driving.

“Qianwen” and “Wukong” Double Breakthroughs

Strong Growth in Instant Retail

With the continued popularity of OpenClaw (also known as “Lobster”), transforming chatbots into agents has become a trend, accelerating AI into a scale operation era.

On March 17, Alibaba launched its first enterprise-level AI native platform—“Wukong.” As Alibaba’s B2B AI application portal, Wukong will be directly integrated into DingTalk, used by over 20 million enterprise organizations, deeply embedding model capabilities into enterprise workflows, and forming a dual-line breakthrough with the AI ToC application “Qianwen.”

The financial report shows that in February this year, the monthly active users of Alibaba’s AI ToC flagship application Qianwen exceeded 300 million. During the Spring Festival, over 140 million users completed their first AI shopping experience using Qianwen’s intelligent agent.

“Qianwen app and Alibaba’s consumer ecosystem are accelerating integration across various scenarios, significantly driving new user growth and transaction activity,” said Daniel Zhang. “In the future, leveraging the full-stack AI capabilities of ‘large models + cloud + chips’ and full integration with Alibaba’s business ecosystem, we will continue to advance in both AI ToB and ToC.”

Alibaba’s e-commerce group also brought new highlights. Despite high investments in instant retail, user experience, and AI technology, Alibaba’s e-commerce group achieved an adjusted EBITA of 34.613 billion yuan. This quarter, instant retail revenue, including Taobao Flash Sale, grew strongly by 56% year-over-year, with a significant narrowing of losses. Meanwhile, active buyers on Taobao App and 88VIP users both saw double-digit growth. Currently, the number of 88VIP members is close to 60 million.

MaaS Platform Token Consumption Surges

Expected to Become Alibaba Cloud’s Largest Revenue Product

According to Alibaba Group’s AI strategic goal: in the next five years, including MaaS, cloud and AI commercialization annual revenue will surpass $100 billion. The growth potential of the MaaS platform is particularly promising.

Daniel Zhang stated that Alibaba has formed a complete full-stack AI capability from infrastructure to applications and is accelerating the construction of the MaaS platform. Over the past three months, the token consumption in the public model service market on the Balian MaaS platform increased sixfold. It is expected that MaaS revenue will become Alibaba Cloud’s largest income source.

Tokens, as the smallest computational and semantic units for processing text, images, audio, and other information in large models, are regarded as the core pricing and settlement units for AI services. As AI agents accelerate, token calls have surged dramatically. Major internet companies are shifting from parameter competitions to strategic positioning in AI large models. Whoever controls the token dominance will hold the core production material in the era of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

On the application side, on March 16, Alibaba established a new Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group, focusing on “creating tokens, delivering tokens, applying tokens,” including the Tongyi Laboratory, MaaS business line, Qianwen division, Wukong division, and AI Innovation division, providing organizational support for dual-line AI ToB and ToC development and enhancing strategic coordination.

Moreover, Alibaba is fostering a corporate culture that encourages everyone to use AI. It is understood that Alibaba is promoting an internal program allowing employees to use paid AI tools like Wukong and Qoder series for free in R&D and general office work, with token quotas provided by the company. Employees purchasing Balian Coding Plan memberships or external AI development tools can also apply for reimbursement.

Previously, Alibaba launched the new generation large model Qwen 3.5-Plus, which performed excellently across reasoning, programming, and agent benchmarks. Daniel Zhang revealed that a next version optimized for coding and agent scenarios based on Qwen 3.5 will be released soon.

AI is evolving from an auxiliary tool into autonomous agents capable of executing complex tasks, becoming a driving force for productivity in the new era. Alibaba’s dual focus on B2B and B2C AI not only significantly lowers the barriers for ordinary users, individual developers, and enterprises to invoke agents but also expands the growth space for the MaaS platform and accelerates AI commercialization.