Tsai sells Europe open weights; Alibaba's safety record is seven results in 238 releases
Chairman Joe Tsai is pitching open weights as Europe's road to AI independence while Alibaba Cloud negotiates Spanish solar power and first cloud regions in three more countries. The disclosure record behind the pitch: seven published safety results across 238 releases.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Alibaba is building the infrastructure Tsai says Europe lacks
Joe Tsai told founders in Turin on October 7 that open weights are "the only way" for Europe to be independent in AI 1. Take a model, train it on local factory data, run it in your own data center, and, in his words, a company no longer depends on the original developer 1.
The concrete arrived the same week: Alibaba−1.21% — Alibaba, down 1.21 percent today is in preliminary talks with solar producer Solaria to power a data center at Puertollano, south of Madrid, and has approached other suppliers 2. First cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands follow within 12 months, after France, live since June 13. Eddie Wu targets more than 20 gigawatts of global capacity by 2032 and says industry demand "far outpaces our supply capabilities" 34.
$25 billion a year in, RMB10.9 billion a quarter out
The buildout runs on e-commerce cash: about $25 billion a year of free cash flow, capital spending doubled three years running, quarterly profit already cut 75% by the bill 1. Jefferies still made Alibaba a top pick on October 8, forecasting AI Cloud and Compute revenue up more than 50% to RMB60.5 billion this quarter against AI Lab losses of RMB10.9 billion 5.
The market being bought is a price war, and the cheap seats are Chinese. Anthropic$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B cut Haiku 5.5 to $0.10 per million input tokens; Qwen3.7 Flash lists at $0.03, a rate that holds only to 32,000 input tokens, above which it costs $0.10, Haiku's tier 6.
Qwen3.7 Flash undercuts Haiku 5.5 threefold, but only to 32,000 tokens
Data
| Input price per million tokens | |
|---|---|
| Anthropic Haiku 5.5 | $0.1 |
| Qwen3.7 Flash, to 32k tokens | $0.03 |
| Qwen3.7 Flash, above 32k | $0.1 |
Seven results in 238 releases
857 Chinese model releases since 2021; nine shipped with a safety result in hand
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Releases shipped | 857 |
| Any published safety result | 31 |
| Result at launch | 9 |
SemiAnalysis counted 857 releases by nine leading Chinese developers since 2021: 31 carried any published safety result, nine at launch 7. Alibaba's own line is 238 releases, seven results, three at launch, and no Chinese frontier text model has ever shipped with a dangerous-capability evaluation 7.
Brussels writes duties by compute, not license
Washington's September 29 accord is voluntary and creates no new requirements 8. Brussels can demand evaluations before release, restrict EU market access and fine up to 3% of turnover, whatever the provider's address; refusing an information request or blocking an evaluation is fineable on its own 9. Systemic-risk duties trigger at 10^25 FLOP of training compute 7, and every general-purpose model sold in Europe must document its training data for the AI Office 10.
The two camps talk past each other. Tsai says the closed US labs no longer publish because they do not want to share 1; Zhu Songchun of the Beijing Institute for General AI calls extinction talk "Oppenheimer-style marketing" 7. The regulator that fines blocked evaluations faces a lab with three launch-day results in five years 7.
Madrid's decree comes first, then the December print
Nothing yet says Brussels will aim compute-triggered duties at open-weight Chinese models, and nobody has said an EU subsidiary of a Chinese parent fails Spain's establishment test 2. If they bite, the international leg funding RMB10.9 billion-a-quarter lab losses is the leg that gets repriced. The dates are set: Madrid's government wants its rules published by the end of the year 2, then comes Alibaba's December-quarter print, where Jefferies expects growth to accelerate 5.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
