"Speaking on Alibaba Group's Q2 earnings call, CEO Yongming Wu said "demand for AI is accelerating" and also deepening due to demand "from all aspects of enterprise operations ... with applications across product development, throughout manufacturing processes, and also in terms of supporting enterprises and customers [to] use their products." "We're not even able to keep pace with the growth in customer demand, in terms of the pace at which we can deploy new servers," he added."
""If an external customer is utilizing all of our services across cloud, all of Alibaba Cloud services spanning storage, spanning big data, and all of these other things, then of course that customer would be accorded a higher level of priority," he said. "If you have a customer that's merely renting a GPU to meet some very simple inferencing needs, then the demands of those customers would accordingly be given a slightly lower level of priority.""
AI demand is accelerating and deepening across product development, manufacturing processes, and customer support. Alibaba Cloud cannot deploy new servers fast enough to keep pace with growing customer demand and is rationing GPUs to prioritize customers that consume the full range of Alibaba Cloud services, such as storage and big data. Customers renting GPUs solely for simple inference receive lower priority. Alibaba reports GPUs — including the latest models and systems three to five years old — are running at full utilization. Alibaba invested RMB 120 billion (about US$16 billion) in AI-adjacent capital expenditure over the past 12 months and expects to increase planned multi-year spending. The role of U.S. bans on advanced accelerator sales to China is not specified.
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