Alibaba's cloud unit is now approaching a $17 billion annual revenue and the company said it will continue to invest in AI services.
The company's Cloud Intelligence Group reported fiscal second quarter revenue of $4.22 billion, up 7% from a year ago, due to "double-digit public cloud growth, including increasing adoption of AI-related products."
As for profits, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group reported second quarter EBITA of $379 million.
Alibaba's cloud division said AI services grew at a triple-digit pace. "We will continue to invest in anticipation of customer growth and in technology, particularly in AI infrastructure, to capture the increasing trend of cloud adoption for AI," the company said in a statement.
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Despite trade restrictions in China, Alibaba has been investing in generative AI. The company recently open sourced its Qwen 2.5 large language models and has been cutting prices for AI workloads. Alibaba's cloud division cut prices for API calls and upgraded infrastructure to boost efficiency.
Alibaba, best known for its e-commerce properties, reported second quarter net income of $6.25 billion on revenue of $33.7 billion, up 5% from a year ago.
In a statement, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said:
"We entered into long-term collaborations with industry peers to broaden payment and logistics services on Taobao and Tmall platforms, which we expect will accelerate our overall growth. Growth in our Cloud business accelerated from prior quarters, with revenues from public cloud products growing in double digits and AI-related product revenue delivering triple-digit growth. We are more confident in our core businesses than ever."
