Sudden positive news, skyrocketing surge!

【Intro】Alibaba saves Hang Seng Tech!

Brothers and sisters, Alibaba’s price-hike announcement once again saves the Hang Seng Tech Index!

On March 18 at midday, Alibaba Cloud’s official website released an announcement: due to a surge in global AI demand and rising supply-chain costs, Alibaba Cloud’s AI compute and storage products will see price increases of up to 34%.

Alibaba Cloud’s price hike this round includes: compute-card products such as the Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E rising by 5%~34%; and file storage products CPFS (Smart Computing Edition) rising by 30%.

According to insiders, another important reason for this round of price hikes is “a sharp surge in Token call volume.” During the Spring Festival, AI Agent applications exploded. Alibaba Cloud’s MaaS business, Bailian, achieved the highest historical growth rate in the first 1—3 months of this year. Alibaba Cloud is channeling scarce AI compute resources toward Token businesses.

Two days ago, Alibaba established a brand-new business group, the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH), including the Tongyi Lab, the MaaS business line, the Qianwen division, the Wukong division, and the AI Innovation division. It covers a complete layout from foundational model R&D, to model service platforms, to AI application deployment for both individual and enterprise users. At the same time, Alibaba will build a unified model service platform—Bailian—by providing MaaS commercialization services externally through Alibaba Cloud.

In an internal letter, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming said: “We are right on the eve of the AGI explosion. A large number of digital tasks will be supported by hundreds of billions of AI Agents, and these AI Agents will be powered and run by Tokens generated by models, becoming the primary medium for human interaction with the digital world.”

After the news came out, Alibaba’s stock price surged straight up, currently up more than 3%, turning the Hang Seng Tech Index from a decline to a rise.

Alibaba is joining the ranks of tech giants such as Google, attempting to monetize AI-related services. To a certain extent, this is a response to market concerns that massive AI spending has not yet brought enough returns.

A few hours before Alibaba released the announcement, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that the company is accelerating the production of H200 AI accelerators for Chinese customers, indicating that demand for AI compute power in the Chinese market remains strong.