Alibaba (BABA) rose more than 3% on Thursday to $138.18. On the news front, the group recently announced two significant moves in the artificial intelligence space.
The first involves price adjustments. On April 15, Alibaba Cloud issued an announcement stating that, to ensure stable supply of underlying hardware, improve operation and maintenance service quality, and respond to changes in computing power costs, it would moderately raise prices for some MU model unit services on its large model service platform, Bailian, with price increases ranging from 2% to 7%. Institutional analysis suggests that token usage is entering a new phase of accelerated growth. Coupled with the overall upward trend in cloud computing pricing, the logic of simultaneous growth in volume and price in the industry is gradually being realized and is expected to be highly sustainable.
The second involves product launches. On April 16, Alibaba released the world model Happy Oyster, further expanding its AI product matrix. This model can generate 3D environments and interactive videos, supporting applications such as film, video content production, and game development. According to Alibaba, the product is currently in a limited early-access experience phase. Happy Oyster was developed by Alibaba’s newly established business unit, Token Hub (ATH Innovation Business Unit), and comes from the same team that previously created the video generation model Happy Horse. The latter performed well in early testing. These tools indicate that Alibaba is attempting to monetize AI in the creative field.
This release is the latest in Alibaba’s recent flurry of AI product launches. Analysts point out that this move is intended to compete more directly with rivals such as Tencent Holdings, reflecting how companies across China’s IT industry are racing to integrate AI into consumer platforms. For investors, this signals that Alibaba wants to go beyond e-commerce and cloud computing and move into AI-driven content creation. The core question now is whether these tools can be genuinely put to use and generate new profit models.
Notably, Alibaba has identified cloud computing and AI as its core growth engines and has set a goal to increase related annual revenue from current levels to $100 billion within five years—representing roughly a fivefold increase from its current scale.
