<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/65257dba-cdce-43c2-aac8-90281e73209d.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/65257dba-cdce-43c2-aac8-90281e73209d.png"/> Author | Huang Yu
On March 19, Alibaba Group released its Q3 financial report for the fiscal year 2026 (October to December 2025), with total revenue increasing by 2% year-on-year to 284.843 billion yuan, below the market expectation of 289.795 billion yuan; adjusted net profit was 16.71 billion yuan, a decrease of 67% year-on-year, while the market expectation was 29.579 billion yuan; net profit attributable to shareholders was 16.322 billion yuan, also down 67% year-on-year.
The reason for the profit decline is well known, as Alibaba is heavily investing in the competition for instant retail and AI.
In this context, Alibaba's free cash flow in the fourth quarter of last year fell sharply by 71% to 11.346 billion yuan.
Alibaba Cloud is now the second fastest-growing business segment for Alibaba, with a year-on-year growth of 36% to 43.284 billion yuan in the fourth quarter, further increasing from the 34% growth in the third quarter. The fastest-growing business for Alibaba is instant retail, which saw a year-on-year growth of 56% in the fourth quarter.
During the conference call that day, Alibaba Group CEO Eric Wu revealed that Alibaba Cloud's external commercialization revenue officially surpassed 100 billion yuan as of the end of February in the fiscal year 2026. Facing the long-term growth momentum of the AI market, Alibaba Group's AI strategy has very clear commercial goals—over the next five years, the cloud and AI commercialization revenue, including MaaS, is expected to exceed 100 billion dollars.
The explosion of AI applications is undoubtedly the core driving force behind Alibaba Cloud's revenue growth, with AI-related product revenue now experiencing triple-digit growth for the tenth consecutive quarter.
Eric Wu stated that Alibaba has formed a complete full-stack AI capability from AI infrastructure to applications and is accelerating the construction of the MaaS platform. In the past three months, the token consumption scale of the public model service market on the Bai Lian MaaS platform has increased sixfold, and it is expected that commercial MaaS revenue will become Alibaba Cloud's largest revenue product.
The previously &#34;low-key&#34; Tmall Genie made its debut in Alibaba's financial report.
The self-developed GPU by Tmall Genie has achieved large-scale production, supporting Alibaba's internal businesses and providing commercial services to hundreds of external enterprise clients through Alibaba Cloud, making a substantial contribution to cloud infrastructure supply.
Eric Wu revealed that as of February 2026, Tmall Genie's self-developed GPU chips have cumulatively delivered 470,000 units at scale. In Alibaba Cloud's actual business scenarios, over 60% of Tmall Genie chips serve external commercial clients, having completed large-scale adaptation of AI tasks for external clients, supporting over 400 enterprise clients' AI tasks across various industries, including internet, financial services, and autonomous driving.
On the model and application front, on March 16, Alibaba officially announced the establishment of the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group, aimed at creating a new organization focused on the core goals of &#34;creating tokens, delivering tokens, and applying tokens,&#34; directly led by Eric Wu
Alibaba Token Hub has integrated five business lines, covering a complete layout from underlying models to application ends: Tongyi Laboratory is responsible for the research and development of multimodal foundational models, continuously pursuing the upper limits of model capabilities; the MaaS business line builds an open model service platform to support the AI ecosystem across the industry; the Qianwen Division focuses on personal AI assistants; the AI Innovation Division is responsible for exploring new models and new markets; and the Wukong Division is a new department that has appeared in the public eye for the first time during this adjustment.
The Wukong Division is positioned as a &#34;B-end AI native work platform,&#34; aiming to deeply integrate model capabilities into enterprise workflows.
At the earnings conference, Eddie Wu also elaborated on Alibaba's full-stack AI layout—using chips and cloud computing as the AI infrastructure layer; with Token Hub as the main line, consisting of AI models and application layers made up of large models, MaaS business, and &#34;to B + to C&#34; applications, together forming a complete capability from AI Infra to applications.
Alibaba's ambitious AI strategic vision is now more clearly presented to the outside world

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- On March 19, Alibaba Group released its Q3 fiscal report for 2026, showing total revenue rose 2% year-on-year to 284.84 billion yuan, falling short of market expectations.  
- The adjusted net profit dropped 67% to 16.71 billion yuan, with the decline attributed to heavy investments in instant retail and AI competition, alongside a significant 71% reduction in free cash flow.  
- Alibaba Cloud experienced a 36% revenue growth, highlighting AI applications as a core growth driver, while the newly established Alibaba Token Hub aims to integrate AI capabilities across various sectors.

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Eddie Wu's "Five-Year Plan": Alibaba Cloud and AI commercialization revenue to exceed 100 billion USD