--- title: "Alibaba starts selling AI tokens on Taobao October 20 after a Z.ai storefront lifted token sales 160%" description: "Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall open an AI-token product category on October 20, 2026, selling compute bundles built with Z.ai and MiniMax. It lands days after Meta put a day-one price on its biggest open model and Reflection shipped one pitched on cost per finished task." publisher: "The Inference" section: "Platforms" published: 2026-10-17T17:18:38.252Z modified: 2026-10-17T17:18:38.252Z canonical: https://theinference.org/article/alibaba-starts-selling-ai-tokens-on-taobao-october-20-after-a-z-ai-storefront-lifted-token-sales-160 language: en keywords: "Alibaba, Taobao, China, Open Models, AI Tokens" --- # Alibaba starts selling AI tokens on Taobao October 20 after a Z.ai storefront lifted token sales 160% > Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall open an AI-token product category on October 20, 2026, selling compute bundles built with Z.ai and MiniMax. It lands days after Meta put a day-one price on its biggest open model and Reflection shipped one pitched on cost per finished task. ## Taobao puts AI tokens on the shelf [Alibaba](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/alibaba)'s Taobao and Tmall marketplaces will sell AI tokens as a product category when Singles' Day, its biggest shopping festival, opens official sales on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, [with a record 1 million brands taking part](https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3371203/alibaba-embed-ai-throughout-taobao-tmall-merchant-operations-2027-executive) [1]. The tokens bundle computing power from the Chinese labs Z.ai and MiniMax for students, researchers and small teams; Tmall will also sell [Intel](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/intel) and [AMD](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/amd) personal computers with Alibaba's Qwen models preinstalled [1]. AI will "comprehensively enter" merchants' internal workflows from 2027, Tmall president Liu Bo said at the Singles' Day briefing, led by Qwen Work, Alibaba's enterprise AI assistant, whose e-commerce version began testing this week [1]. The push follows a year of AI rollouts on the platforms that "exceeded expectations", he said [1]. ## The shelf already moves tokens Tmall opened an "AI Space Station" in early September, selling subscriptions and token top-ups from Alibaba Cloud and the Chinese labs [Z.ai](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/z-ai), MiniMax and [DeepSeek](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/deepseek). Within 48 hours of Z.ai's storefront opening, transactions in AI tokens and subscriptions across Taobao and Tmall [jumped more than 160%, a Tmall spokesperson said](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/china-s-moonshot-and-z-ai-bring-ai-model-subscription-race-to-tmall-s-retail-shelves/ar-AA2bIDUI) [2]. The suppliers [grow fast and lose money at it](https://theinference.org/article/china-is-closing-the-ai-gap-profits-are-the-harder-test): Z.ai's first-half 2026 revenue ran about $142 million, up about 400%, against a net loss of roughly 2 billion yuan, and MiniMax's adjusted net loss more than doubled to $293 million [2]. Labs that take the shelf become "more dependent on traffic controlled by the platform", analyst Poe Zhao warned [2]. ## Chinese open models took the usage DeepSeek, the Chinese lab praised for its models' efficiency, handled 17% of the tokens routed by Vercel, a service that passes developers' requests to many models, by May 2026, up from under 1%, while keeping only about 1% of what those developers spent, per Rest of World [3]. On OpenRouter, a second routing service, open-weight models, whose published files anyone can download and run on their own servers, carried 60% of September's token volume from US requests, with Chinese labs supplying most of it [4]. Buyers choose them for price: [Pinterest](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/pinterest)'s chief executive told investors in November 2025 that fine-tuned open models cut its AI costs by 90% versus leading proprietary models [3]. Alibaba [pays for Qwen out of e-commerce](https://theinference.org/article/alibaba-s-qwen-is-winning-corporate-america-the-fraud-suit-says-its-edge-came-from-claude), and [its capital spending reached $18.2 billion in the March 2026 quarter](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001577552), up 58% from $11.5 billion a year earlier [5]. *Chart: **Alibaba's capital spending has more than quadrupled in two fiscal years** Column chart of Alibaba's capital spending by fiscal year: $6.3 billion in FY2021, $8.4 billion in FY2022, $4.9 billion in FY2023, $4.4 billion in FY2024, $11.5 billion in FY2025 and $18.2 billion in FY2026.* *Capital spending by fiscal year, in US dollars. Alibaba's fiscal year ends March 31, so FY2026 spans April 2025 through March 2026, and the March 2026 quarter alone ran $18.2 billion. Figures from Alibaba's SEC filings. [9]* ## Meta priced its answer on day one [Meta](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/meta)'s answer arrived priced. On October 15, 2026, it released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model it calls the most capable US one to date, [listed by providers on day one at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output](https://venturebeat.com/technology/meta-unveils-muse-spark-open-the-new-top-u-s-open-weights-model-and-it-runs-on-two-paired-mac-desktops) [3][4]. The next morning [Reflection AI](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/reflection-ai), a two-year-old startup that has raised about $4.7 billion with [Nvidia](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/nvidia) among its backers, released Beam [3][6]. Beam has 501 billion parameters, 23 billion of them active, and ships under Apache 2.0, a license that lets anyone host it commercially [3][6]. [Amazon](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/amazon) put it into SageMaker JumpStart, AWS's managed model catalog, the same day; Reflection [trained it with more than 100 million reinforcement-learning rollouts on 10,500 Nvidia GB300 GPUs](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/introducing-reflection-beam-an-open-weight-model-for-agentic-coding-on-aws/) [3][7]. Its launch chart runs down two versions of Alibaba's Qwen 3.8, yet on Terminal-Bench 2.1, a command-line agent test, every published Chinese result still beats both US releases [3][4][8]. *Chart: **Chinese open models still beat both new US releases on Terminal-Bench 2.1** Column chart of Terminal-Bench 2.1 scores: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 90.6%, Moonshot Kimi K3 at 85.0%, Z.ai GLM 5.3 at 83.9%, Alibaba Qwen 3.8 at 82.0%, Reflection Beam at 80.1% and Meta Muse Spark Open at 76.4%.* *Vendor-published scores on Terminal-Bench 2.1, a command-line agent test, in percent of tasks completed. DeepSeek and Beam figures come from Reflection's coding table; Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, Qwen 3.8 and Muse Spark Open from Meta's model card. [3][4]* ## No one has priced a finished task Reflection's hosted service is free in beta, and it has no dollar figure for cost per finished task [3]. Its compute comparison is an estimate that skips the cost of reading the prompt, and its product chief concedes DeepSeek and Qwen may have "better kernels or fused kernels" [3]. Meta's license demands "Built with Muse Spark Open" attribution and a separate agreement from businesses above $20 million in revenue that resell the model as a service [4][8]. For Alibaba holders, the readings after October 20 are opening-day AI-token sales on Tmall [1], then the cloud and AI revenue line when December-quarter results land. Qwen Work follows into merchant workflows from 2027 [1]. Whether the free models' usage turns into paid token sales is the question the October 20 opening begins to answer. ## Takeaway Taobao and Tmall open AI-token sales on October 20 with bundles from Z.ai and MiniMax; Chinese open models already carry the usage, but the labs lose money on it and no one has priced a finished task. ## Sources 1. [South China Morning Post, "Alibaba to embed AI throughout Taobao, Tmall merchant operations in 2027: executive", 16 October 2026](https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3371203/alibaba-embed-ai-throughout-taobao-tmall-merchant-operations-2027-executive) 2. [South China Morning Post via MSN, "China's Moonshot and Z.ai bring AI model subscription race to Tmall's retail shelves", 7 September 2026](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/china-s-moonshot-and-z-ai-bring-ai-model-subscription-race-to-tmall-s-retail-shelves/ar-AA2bIDUI) 3. [VentureBeat, "Reflection's Beam aims to undercut Chinese open models with fewer tokens, not cheaper tokens", 16 October 2026](https://venturebeat.com/technology/reflections-beam-aims-to-undercut-chinese-open-models-with-fewer-tokens-not-cheaper-tokens) 4. [VentureBeat, "Meta unveils Muse Spark Open, the new top U.S. open weights model", 15 October 2026](https://venturebeat.com/technology/meta-unveils-muse-spark-open-the-new-top-u-s-open-weights-model-and-it-runs-on-two-paired-mac-desktops) 5. [Alibaba Group Holding, quarterly figures from its SEC filings, retrieved 17 October 2026](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001577552) 6. [TechCrunch, "Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost", 5 October 2026](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/reflection-debuts-beam-a-open-weight-ai-model-to-rival-chinese-models-at-lower-compute-cost/) 7. [AWS Machine Learning Blog, "Introducing Reflection Beam: an open-weight model for agentic coding on AWS", October 2026](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/introducing-reflection-beam-an-open-weight-model-for-agentic-coding-on-aws/) 8. [Unite.AI, "Meta's 816B-Parameter Muse Spark Open Weights Are Now Public", 15 October 2026](https://www.unite.ai/metas-816b-parameter-muse-spark-open-weights-are-now-public/) 9. [Alibaba, annual figures from its SEC filings, retrieved 17 October 2026](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001577552) --- Alibaba starts selling AI tokens on Taobao October 20 after a Z.ai storefront lifted token sales 160% — The Inference. Canonical: https://theinference.org/article/alibaba-starts-selling-ai-tokens-on-taobao-october-20-after-a-z-ai-storefront-lifted-token-sales-160