Damo: Alibaba Cloud targets more than 20 gigawatts to support $240 billion in revenue

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Morgan Stanley released a research report saying that Alibaba-W (09988) released key points at the 2026 Yunqi Conference. The bank maintained the “BABA.US” rating and target price of 180 US dollars and regarded it as the preferred stock; the bank believes that in 2032, global cloud production capacity will exceed 20 gigawatts, which can provide a path to cloud revenue production capacity of about 240 billion US dollars. At the same time, Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen)'s rapid monetization support demand and T-Head (T-Head) penetration rate should help increase production capacity Expansion and rising profit margins.

The bank pointed out that Alibaba is targeting a global cloud production capacity of more than 20 gigawatts in 2032, which is higher than the bank's original estimate of 15 to 16 gigawatts in 2030. According to the bank's estimates, Ali should reach 3 to 4 gigawatts of production capacity by the end of 2025, which means a net global increase of more than 16 to 17 gigawatts over the next seven years, with an average of about 2 to 3 gigawatts per year.

The bank estimates that if it were built on its own, the capital cost per gigawatt would be about 30 billion US dollars; if foreign high-performance chips were used, it would be higher, and if Pingtou were used, it would be lower. Some 20 GW may be leased (operating expenses) or managed capacity (limited capital/operating expenses). Assuming an EBITDA profit margin of about 90% (before depreciation and amortization) and less than 3 years of return to the current period, the bank estimates that each gigawatt can bring in incremental revenue of about 12 billion US dollars. 20 gigawatts of production capacity can support total revenue of about 240 billion US dollars and external revenue of about 168 billion US dollars in 2032 (assuming 70% external share), which is in line with Ali's 2030 external cloud revenue target of 100 billion US dollars, which means a compound annual growth rate of about 30% from 2031 to 2032.

In terms of models, Qwen 4 is expected to be launched soon, and Qwen 4.5/5 may be expanded to 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters; Tongyi Qianwen continues to expand in multiple modes, and monetization is strong. Qwen3.8's revenue increased 8.5 times compared to Qwen 3.7 within two months, and the number of tokens (tokens) increased 12 times. The bank estimates that by the end of August, MaaS will have annual recurring revenue of about 20 billion yuan, compared with about 16 billion yuan in mid-August, and a target of 30 billion yuan by the end of the year.

On Pingtou's side, the PPU roadmap includes the V900 (training and inference accelerator, which is about 3 times that of the current M890), which is expected to be launched in the third fiscal quarter of 2027, followed by the launch of the J900 in the third fiscal quarter of 2028; the bank expects Pingtou's share to rise from about 10% to 40% to 50% over a long period of time, which will help achieve the 20 gigawatt production capacity target, while reducing computing power costs and supporting cloud profit margins and ROIC improvements.