Physix Frontier badgePhysix Frontier
PublishChinese | EN

Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (enbrief · Sep 29, 2026)

Alibaba Cloud external customer growth just 27%, far below 45% overall

KEY FACTS

  • Alibaba Cloud's revenue growth over the past four quarters was 34%, 36%, 38%, and 45%.
  • About 40% of Alibaba Cloud's revenue comes from within Alibaba Group, while external customers account for roughly 60%.
  • Excluding Ant Group, Alibaba Cloud's revenue growth from independent third-party customers is about 27%.
  • In fiscal year 2026, Ant Group purchased about 19.1 billion yuan worth of Alibaba Cloud services, up 72% year over year.
  • The Alibaba Cloud plus T-Head business has a profit margin of about 12%, with quarterly adjusted EBITA peaking at about 5.6 billion yuan.

KEY DATA

173.2 billion yuanAlibaba Cloud total revenue over past four quarters
about 27%Alibaba Cloud pure external revenue YoY growth
about 19.1 billion yuanAnt Group FY2026 purchases from Alibaba Cloud
about 12%Alibaba Cloud plus T-Head business profit margin

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

Alibaba Cloud's overall growth looks impressive, but nearly 40% of revenue comes from internal and related parties, so its true external commercialization capability is overstated. Excluding Ant, the 27% growth rate is clearly below AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. Whether Alibaba's AI transformation can form a closed loop hinges on whether independent third-party customers can support its hundred-billion-dollar goal, not on internal compute self-circulation.

Source: enbrief original report ↗