Alibaba's cloud computing business delivered 13% revenue growth and the company said it is "committed to advancing multi-modal AI technology and expanding our opensource initiatives."
While DeepSeek models have garnered the attention, Alibaba has continued to advance its Qwen large language models (LLMs). For the enterprise, Qwen may be more scalable and a better option than something with a bunch of unknowns like DeepSeek.
DeepSeek's real legacy: Shifting the AI conversation to returns, value, edge
Alibaba's Cloud Intelligence Group reported fiscal third quarter revenue of $4.35 billion, up 13% from a year ago. Excluding Alibaba subsidiaries, Alibaba's cloud unit delivered growth of 11% from a year ago. Adjusted EBITA for the third quarter was $430 million.
The surge in demand "mainly driven by the double-digit revenue growth of public cloud products including AI-related products," said Alibaba. The company also noted that AI-related product revenue has maintained triple-digit revenue growth for six consecutive quarters and will continue to invest in AI infrastructure.
Alibaba noted:
“We remain committed to advancing multi-modal AI technology and expanding our open source initiatives. In January 2025, we open-sourced Qwen2.5-VL, our next-generation multi-modal model, and launched our flagship MoE-based model Qwen2.5-Max. Both models deliver globally leading results across recognized benchmarks and are available to users and enterprises through Qwen Chat and our Bailian platform. Since August 2023, we have open-sourced various large models under the Qwen family. As of January 31, 2025, more than 90,000 derivative models had been developed on Hugging Face based on the Qwen family of models, making it one of the largest AI model families worldwide."
