Alibaba token demand reportedly up ~500%, but revenue math is far messier
menhguin · x · 2026-09-20
Caveats on the reported 500% surge in Alibaba Cloud token demand: Vercel Gateway records by model family not provider (so growth is dampened by second-party APIs); token demand is only 35% of cloud revenue, cloud is 18% of Alibaba's overall revenue, and Alibaba isn't the sole cloud provider. So it's not a 500% earnings increase — but as revenue composition inflects, it could still drive multiple expansion.
Related event: Chinese models' token share on Vercel up ~5x in three months(2 posts)→
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