Alibaba shares rise as AI drives 34% cloud sales jump (www.cnbc.com)

Alibaba beat expectations in its fiscal Q2 (ended Sept. 30), reporting total revenue of 247.8 billion yuan ($34.8B), up 5% year-on-year, and cloud computing revenue that jumped 34% to 39.8 billion yuan (vs. 37.9B expected). Cloud growth accelerated from 26% in the prior quarter, and cloud EBITA rose 35% to 3.6 billion yuan. New York-listed shares climbed about 4% premarket on the results. Management attributed the upswing to robust AI demand — AI-related product revenue posted triple-digit year‑over‑year growth for the ninth consecutive quarter. For the AI/ML community the data signal rising enterprise demand for model-powered services and continued heavy infrastructure investment. Alibaba said it will increase spending on AI models and infrastructure on top of a previously announced 380 billion yuan multi‑year plan and has deployed roughly 120 billion yuan in capex toward AI/cloud over the past four quarters. The company’s Qwen models now power the recently launched Qwen app, which hit 10 million downloads in its first week, underscoring Alibaba’s push to compete with Western LLMs and to monetize model-serving via its cloud. The results highlight tighter competition in cloud + model hosting, growing revenue upside for model-based products, and margin pressure elsewhere from aggressive instant‑commerce investments.