Alibaba AI/cloud revenue jumps 38% as Qwen spend pressures profit; Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0 ships

Alibaba posted a 38% jump in AI/cloud revenue with AI products now 30% of external cloud customer revenue. Bloomberg Intelligence notes 90%+ of March-quarter China e-commerce profit was redeployed into Qwen user acquisition. Qwen-Image-VAE-2.0 also released, fixing the compression layer behind image generation.