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Alibaba Cloud is gaining momentum as token-based AI usage reshapes cloud economics and investor interest. A private AI/OPC venture event in Shenzhen on May 31, jointly organized with Alibaba Cloud, highlights growing startup and capital engagement in AI infrastructure. Concurrently, Galaxy Securities says surging token consumption is driving a structural shift from IaaS server-hour pricing to MaaS-style billing tied to token usage, boosting demand for AI inference and expanding high-margin cloud services. Together these developments signal an industry inflection: rising token-driven workloads are increasing cloud revenue quality, drawing more venture attention and accelerating strategic realignment among cloud providers.
Token-based AI usage is shifting cloud billing from IaaS server-hour models toward token/MaaS pricing, improving revenue quality and margins for cloud providers. Tech professionals need to reassess cost models, architecture for inference workloads, and go-to-market plans as demand and investor interest grow.
Dossier last updated: 2026-05-23 14:27:58
China’s National Data Administration (NDA) held a “token (词元) economy” symposium on May 22, chaired by NDA Director Liu Liehong, with participants from academia and industry including Alibaba Cloud, Tencent and Kimi (月之暗面). Experts and company representatives discussed promoting healthy, sustainable token-economy development to fully unlock data-as-a-factor value, with the NDA planning to integrate token-economy work into its agenda and prioritize high-quality datasets and a national unified compute network. The NDA highlighted tokens (词元) as the basic computation, billing and statistical unit for large models and noted rapid growth in daily token calls in China, underscoring policy focus on market-based data allocation and infrastructure to support AI commercialization.
5个月MaaS收入增长15倍，阿里云找到了做大Token生意的办法
深圳 5.31 AI/OPC 闭门创投会 智普阿里云联合
Galaxy Securities reports that rising token (词元) consumption is driving a large-scale increase in AI inference demand, creating a clear tailwind for cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud. The firm argues that tokens are becoming a unified value unit in the AI era, prompting a fundamental shift from traditional IaaS server-hour pricing toward MaaS-style usage billing based on token consumption. That transition should expand high-margin AI service revenue, improve cloud vendors' profitability mix, and put the cloud industry into an upward cycle of rising demand and improving price realization. The note frames this as a structural reconfiguration of cloud business models with broad implications for cloud operators and AI economics.