Alibaba Cloud's Growth Accelerates With AI, Analyst Weighs DeepSeek's Rising Competition

Group 1 - Goldman Sachs analyst Ronald Keung maintained a Buy rating on Alibaba Group Holdings with a price target of $117, highlighting the strong performance of Alibaba's Qwen2.5 family in the Open LLM Leaderboard [1] - Alibaba Cloud is valued at 3 times revenue, compared to Amazon Web Services at 7 times revenue, indicating a significant opportunity for growth in the cloud sector [2] - Keung forecasts group revenue growth of 7% for Alibaba, with cloud revenue growth expected to accelerate to 10% in December 2024 and 12% in March 2025 [3] Group 2 - The analyst noted the competitive landscape of open-source models, which are gaining traction due to their performance and cost advantages [4] - Improvements in computing cost efficiencies and agile Chinese models could enhance the adoption and global expansion of AI applications [5] - Despite rising competition from capital-rich internet giants and affordable start-ups, long-term demand for AI computing is expected to grow as costs decrease [6]