CICC: Optimistic about Alibaba-W's cloud segment revenue acceleration and profit margin improvement trend
CICC released a research report optimistic about Alibaba's cloud segment revenue acceleration and profit margin improvement. Alibaba launched its flagship model Qwen3.8-Max and started public testing, with weight adjustments to be opened next week to drive usage. With its full-stack AI capabilities in cloud and chips, Alibaba Cloud is expected to better meet deployment demands, and its short- to medium-term performance may exceed expectations
According to the Zhitong Finance APP, China International Capital Corporation (CICC) released a research report stating that Alibaba-W (09988) officially launched its next-generation flagship model Qwen3.8-Max on August 3 and simultaneously began the public beta for its enterprise-level agent product Qianwen Office. In the previous week, overseas large-scale cloud vendors led a significant shift in the pricing logic of the cloud sector due to an increase in second-quarter performance.
The report stated that Qwen3.8-Max was launched on the same day as Qianwen Office, bringing the model back to the top tier in China, focusing on enterprise-level AI office applications. The parameters of Qwen3.8-Max have expanded to 24 trillion, activating 95 billion parameters, utilizing sparse MoE and mixed attention mechanisms. The capability enhancements are concentrated in programming, office tasks, scientific research, and long-term tasks, achieving results comparable to the top U.S. model Fable5 in official benchmark evaluations. Next week, Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B will open their weights, marking the first open-source release of the Max series models. The open weights are expected to drive an increase in model usage, while the AI full-stack capabilities, which include both cloud and chips, will enable Alibaba to better meet the deployment needs of open-source models.
The report indicated that Alibaba Cloud is the only cloud vendor in China that simultaneously possesses scale effects, self-developed chips, and first-tier self-developed models, with short to medium-term performance expected to exceed market expectations. As the largest cloud vendor in China, Alibaba Cloud has already formed scale effects in computing power, and as the only full-stack AI provider in the country, it has the self-developed Pingtouge chips and the top-tier Qwen models. The joint optimization of chips, inference platforms, and models effectively enhances model inference efficiency. The report is optimistic about the trend of accelerating revenue and improving profit margins for Alibaba Cloud
