Report: Alibaba Cloud's Daily Token Revenue Has Increased Fivefold from Early April

According to Caijing, as of May 13th, Alibaba Cloud's average daily Token revenue has increased more than fivefold compared to the beginning of April, with monthly revenue now reaching hundreds of millions of yuan.

After 2026, Alibaba Cloud will take Token revenue as a core operating indicator. At the beginning of April this year, Alibaba Cloud set a short-term target for Token revenue growth. The specific requirement is that by May 15th, the average daily Token revenue should increase fivefold compared to the beginning of April. That is to say, Alibaba Cloud needs to achieve the target within two months. Currently, this goal has been met.

Caijing requested comments from Alibaba Cloud, but Alibaba Cloud did not respond to the aforementioned news.

On May 13th, Alibaba Group also released its report for the fiscal year ending 2026 (April 1, 2025 - March 31, 2026). Alibaba Cloud's revenue for the fiscal year 2026 was 158.1 billion yuan, a year-over-year increase of 28.6%. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, Alibaba Cloud's revenue grew by 38% year-over-year to 41.63 billion yuan, with external revenue (excluding contributions from businesses such as Taobao and Tmall within the Alibaba Group) growing at a rate of over 40%. Among them, the revenue from AI-related products reached 8.971 billion yuan, accounting for the first time over 30% of external revenue.

Since Tokens are mainly called through the MaaS (Model as a Service) platform, Alibaba's Bailian MaaS platform performance has always been a focus in the market.Alibaba's management disclosed in a post-earnings conference call that the annual recurring revenue (ARR) of models and applications, including the Bailian platform, is growing rapidly. It exceeded 8 billion yuan in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, and it is likely to exceed 10 billion yuan in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, with expectations to exceed 30 billion yuan by the end of fiscal year 2027.

Caijing understands that although Alibaba Cloud's Token-related revenue currently accounts for a low proportion of total revenue, Alibaba Cloud internally believes there is a huge opportunity.

Because, the consumption of Tokens in the Chinese market is also growing exponentially. The National Data Bureau showed on March 24th that as of March 2026, China's average daily Token usage has exceeded 140 trillion, growing more than 1000 times compared to 10 billion at the beginning of 2024. Compared to 100 trillion at the end of 2025, it has grown by over 40% in just three months.

Over the past decade, domestic and international cloud vendors such as Alibaba Cloud have typically used income and profits from public cloud products such as computing, storage, networking, and databases as the basis for assessment. Taking Tokens as a direct revenue indicator is a phenomenon that began in 2025.

The first to take Token revenue as a core operating indicator was ByteDance's Volcano Engine, and Alibaba Cloud followed this approach in the second half of 2025. Caijing understands that while Alibaba Cloud assesses Token revenue, it will pay more attention to the total revenue of full-stack AI. This includes AI laaS (infrastructure), revenue from training and inference computing power, etc.