off-prem
Cloudy AI is Chinese giant’s ‘most certain’ path to growth as e-commerce slows
Alibaba has revealed margins from its cloudy AI operation are rising so quickly it will be able to achieve return on investment for new hardware purchases faster than previously planned.Speaking on the company’s earnings call yesterday, CFO Toby Xu said the company runs its servers for five years, and that AI servers produce enough revenue to cover their costs in three years. In the fourth and fifth years of a server’s life, the machines therefore generate free cash flow. CEO Eddie Wu said some servers deliver cash for longer, and said machines acquired in 2018 and 2020 – and packing the Nvidia V100 and A100 accelerators – “are still being used by customers at near full capacity.”
Alibaba thinks it can shorten the initial payback period for AI hardware to 2.5 years, because margins for AI services are increasing.
One way the company makes that possible is by using more of its own chips.
