Alibaba launches Wan3.0 video model after $10B share sale

Alibaba rolled out Wan3.0, the newest video model from its Tongyi Lab, on Monday, a day after the company closed a HK$80 billion (roughly $10.2 billion) share placement in Hong Kong whose proceeds are earmarked entirely for AI. Reuters reports the model generates 30-second single-pass clips from text, images, audio, video and, new in this version, documents, spreadsheets, slides and web pages.

The document input is the pitch. Feed it a slide deck, a spreadsheet or a PDF and get back a 30-second 1080p clip. Alibaba Cloud has framed the goal as turning "static, text-heavy data into reality-grade video content", pointing at training videos built from manuals, product demos from slide decks, and video versions of quarterly reports as the target work.

The pricing is aggressive: $0.05 per output second at 480p, $0.10 at 720p and $0.20 at 1080p on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, which puts a full 30-second 1080p clip at $6. Alibaba said Wan3.0 has already been used in short drama and film production, advertising and marketing, tourism promotion and music video creation since a public beta went live on August 6.

The launch is inseparable from the raise. Alibaba last week reported a 75% plunge in quarterly earnings from a year ago, blamed on soaring AI-related capital expenditure, and told investors the share-sale proceeds would go into "full-stack AI capabilities" spanning semiconductors, infrastructure and AI models. Wan3.0 is one of the first shippable products it can point at as that money starts to flow, and it lands mid-summer of a run of China AI launches that has been near-daily on our tracker, our 76th Alibaba item in the last 90 days.