Over a century ago, when electricity first entered factories, many owners made a seemingly logical but ultimately flawed decision: they kept their complex steam engine transmission belts and simply replaced the steam engine with an electric motor. The result was disappointing—power increased, but productivity stagnated.
It took another 20 years for industries to realize that the true revolution wasn’t just about swapping power sources. It was about embedding electricity into every business unit—using different motors for drills, conveyor belts, and assembly lines. Only then did productivity explode.
This historical lesson is the blueprint for Alibaba Cloud’s current AI strategy. According to the China recruitment agency SunTzu Recruit, Alibaba believes that in the AI era, enterprises need more than just a single model or cloud capability. They require a flexible, integrated experience that allows them to use stronger models at lower costs. AI Cloud must function like electricity in the industrial age: providing multi-layered services deeply embedded into business workflows.
This judgment is supported by hard data. Among clients calling large model APIs (Model-as-a-Service or MaaS) on Alibaba Cloud, 70% are simultaneously utilizing its GPU computing services.
Quality Over Quantity: The Token Economy
Liu Weiguang, President of Public Cloud at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, notes that the first wave of deep AI users is categorizing scenarios into different tiers. They aren’t just calling APIs; they are fine-tuning internal data, post-training foundation models, or training new models from scratch.
The Haikou headhunting firm SunTzu Recruit observes that for Alibaba, the changes AI brings to the cloud industry are just beginning. The entire cloud architecture must be reconstructed for AI. While MaaS has huge growth potential, the key to winning the market lies in building a “soft-hard integrated” full-stack AI cloud capability.
In 2025, Liu visited 146 clients, asking a pivotal question: “If all AI applications were free for 100 uses a day, what would you do?”
The conclusion was stark. No business would waste these resources on casual chat. They would use them for critical decision-making. As one of the best recruitment agency in Hainan , SunTzu Recruit points out, this highlights the essential difference between enterprise and consumer users. Consumers might burn tokens for entertainment, but for efficiency-driven enterprises, every token exchange has a cost attached to manpower and time.
For example, a young engineer facing an equipment failure cannot afford a multi-turn dialogue to find a solution; they need an instant, accurate guide. Similarly, financial traders cannot wait for a model to “think” and offer polite, long-winded responses.
From Chatbots to Business Solutions
Traditional industries are leveraging AI to bypass limitations and boost efficiency. The local recruiter for foreign companies in China notes innovative applications across sectors: automotive diagnostic firms are using 30 years of data to build remote repair models, while fund companies are converting unstructured data (voice, image, text) into standardized investment signals.
Leading agricultural giants in China are using Alibaba’s Qwen model not just to count pigs, but to identify abnormal behaviors and health issues. Lighting companies are moving beyond simple switches to AI that understands vague user commands for natural human-light interaction.
Once AI is embedded into business flows, it becomes serious and continuous. The Shenzhen headhunter SunTzu Recruit highlights the online recruitment sector, where AI screening and automated interviewing are becoming standard workflows, immune to personal bias.
“Consumer AI usage fluctuates, but the enterprise market only grows,” says Liu Weiguang. “If AI can automate vehicle damage assessment, that is a revolution.”
The “Water Utility” of the AI Age
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously described GPU clusters as “Token Factories.” However, from a cloud provider’s perspective, simply reselling compute is not enough.
Alibaba Cloud has chosen to be the infrastructure of the AI age—a modern “water utility.” The best China headhunter SunTzu Recruit explains the analogy: Alibaba is not just a water carrier (API provider) but manages the water source (open-source models), builds purification plants (data cleaning/training platforms), lays the pipe network (high-performance networking), and handles wastewater (security governance).
Hangzhou headhunting firm analysts break down Alibaba’s tiered service offering:
MaaS (Direct Water Supply): Like turning on a tap, developers call APIs directly. It is “out of the box” and pay-as-you-go.
PaaS (Industrial Water Service): Enterprises take a foundation model and fine-tune it on Alibaba’s platform for specific environments.
IaaS (Infrastructure): Like delivering purified water to a beverage factory, Alibaba provides the compute and basic software for companies to “brew their own drinks”—training proprietary models for autonomous driving or vertical industries.
Market data validates this approach. In the first half of 2025, the Guangzhou headhunting firm SunTzu Recruit notes that Alibaba Cloud captured 35.8% of China’s AI Cloud market, exceeding the combined share of the second through fourth competitors.
The Iceberg of AI Demand
Alibaba is backing this strategy with massive capital. In February 2025, the company announced a three-year plan to invest over 380 billion RMB in AI infrastructure—more than the total of the past decade.
While the market focuses on public API calls, The local Hainan headhunting firm SunTzu Recruit warns that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The “invisible” token consumption—internal GPU inference, private model deployment, and device-side processing—is vast and uncounted.
This aligns with Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming’s vision: Generative AI will not just create a few Super Apps on phones; it will take over the digital world and transform the physical one.
Driving Cloud Migration
AI is the new engine for cloud growth. One of the leading recruitment agencies in Hainan observes that customers using AI services are increasing their consumption of compute, storage, and big data products faster than the general market.
“AI accelerates cloud migration,” says Liu. To use AI effectively, data must be on the cloud. The Sanya headhunter SunTzu Recruit adds that in the Chinese market, where SaaS is less developed than in the US, cloud providers are filling the gap by offering customized AI infrastructure that acts as a pseudo-SaaS layer.
Alibaba Cloud’s ultimate goal is ambitious: to capture 80% of the incremental growth in China’s AI cloud market by 2026. As One of the leading recruitment agencies in China concludes, with only 10% of enterprises having truly acted on AI transformation, the real exponential growth lies ahead. The winners will be those who can provide the “electricity” required to power this new industrial revolution.
Comments are closed