Alibaba's Revenue Jumps 9% as AI Cloud Growth Hits 45%—But a Profit Plunge Sends Shares Lower

Alibaba's Revenue Jumps 9% as AI Cloud Growth Hits 45%—But a Profit Plunge Sends Shares Lower

Thu, August 20, 2026 at 9:32 PM GMT+3 2 min read

• BABA -8.57%

Chinese tech titan Alibaba reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of 268.95 billion yuan, roughly $40 billion, on Thursday, up 9% year-over-year and slightly ahead of the 268.88 billion yuan analysts expected.

It's the fastest quarterly growth rate the company has posted in roughly three years. Almost all of it traces back to one business line: cloud and AI.

The cloud division is where the growth is coming from. Alibaba Cloud's external revenue growth accelerated to 45%, and AI-related product revenue hit 12.38 billion yuan ($1.82 billion)—its 12th consecutive quarter of triple-digit year-over-year growth. CEO Eddie Wu attributed the quarter's strength to improving commercialization of the company's full-stack AI push, according to Alibaba's earnings statement.

That push isn't cheap. Capital expenditure jumped 75% to 67.7 billion yuan ($10 billion), which Alibaba tied mainly to climbing chip prices and expanding compute capacity as AI demand outpaces supply. Free cash flow swung to an outflow of more than $6.6 billion for the quarter, according to Bloomberg.

Wall Street's reaction was immediate. Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares fell around 5% shortly after the opening bell, before recovering by midday.

The AI monetization play

Alibaba's cloud numbers arrive as the company leans harder into distributing its Qwen models rather than just training them. Earlier this month, Alibaba gave away Qwen 3.8-Max, its most capable model, as open weights for the first time at that scale. In April, it shut down the free tier of its Qwen Code coding agent.

The company is also expanding beyond China's borders. Apple is pairing its in-house model with Alibaba's Qwen to bring Apple Intelligence to Chinese iPhones, a deal that could make Apple the first foreign company allowed to run a proprietary AI model inside China.

That distribution bet is already showing up in the numbers: Chinese open-weight models jumped from under 2% of tokens generated on OpenRouter in late 2024 to roughly 61% by mid-2026, even as Alibaba's quarterly profit shrinks by three-quarters.