Alibaba earnings date and guidance
Alibaba’s next results are expected on December 1, 2026. The key thing to watch is whether external demand fills capacity and turns cloud investment into cash.
What has Alibaba guided for AI products and cloud?
Management has guided to a US$10 billion annualized AI-product revenue run rate in the quarter ending September 2026. Annualized means multiplying the latest quarter’s pace by four; it is not money already collected. If Taobao, which Alibaba owns, uses Alibaba Cloud, that may prove the technology’s value, but money moving between Alibaba divisions is not new revenue for the consolidated group.
The larger promise is to exceed US$100 billion in annual combined external cloud and AI revenue within five years. It includes ordinary computing, storage and databases, not only model services. Management also maintains a calendar-year-end target of RMB30 billion in annual recurring revenue from model and application services, including model as a service, through which customers use hosted models instead of running their own systems.
| Period | Low | High | Given on | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annualized revenue run rate of our AI products | Quarter to Sep 2026 (FY2027) | 10 | 10 | Aug 20, 2026 |
What are Alibaba’s recent revenue and profit trends?
June 2026 brought higher sales but much weaker profitability. Revenue rose, while gross margin, operating income, net income and diluted EPS all fell sharply.
| Jun 2026 | Mar 2026 | Dec 2025 | Sep 2025 | Jun 2025 | Mar 2025 | Dec 2024 | Sep 2024 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 268,953 | 243,380 | 284,843 | 247,795 | 247,652 | |||
| Gross margin | 38.2% | 34.5% | 40.5% | 39.2% | 44.9% | |||
| Operating income | 15,161 | -848 | 10,645 | 5,365 | 34,988 | |||
| Net income | 10,614 | 25,541 | 16,383 | 21,019 | 40,649 | |||
| EPS, diluted | 0.46 | 1.30 | 0.74 | 1.09 | 2.25 | |||
| = Free cash flow | -44,733 | -18,351 | 7,033 | -21,402 | -18,004 |
What should investors watch in Alibaba’s next results?
The decisive evidence will be paying customers, repeatable merchant returns and regulatory execution. September-quarter results should test the annualized AI-product milestone, while December-quarter disclosures should test the model-and-application-services target.
Investors should track external cloud sales, margins, capital spending and free cash flow together. Alibaba separates AI Cloud and Compute Services from AI Labs and Applications, allowing a basic question: are infrastructure sales becoming profitable enough to support the continuing cost of developing and distributing models?