Alibaba Cloud launches Smart Fusion multi-model API at Apsara 2026

At Apsara 2026, Alibaba Cloud introduced Smart Fusion, a unified API that routes across multiple models and, Alibaba claims, cuts token costs by 50%. It also launched Smart Studio as a model-as-a-service platform and Smart Video, capable of generating videos up to an hour long.

The company is expanding infrastructure with new regions planned in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands, a push into Europe.

Multi-model routing is a crowded idea, but cost is this week's dominant enterprise concern, from Meta's Claude bill to DeepSeek's cheap-but-strong results. Alibaba is betting routing is the lever.

Separately, researchers at Hirundo flagged censorship behavior in Alibaba's Qwen models, which may complicate European adoption. Watch whether the 50% claim holds in independent tests.