Zhipu's new model benchmarks, NVIDIA's Switchyard routing release, and JPMorgan's Alibaba Cloud valuation report.
Benchmark tests circulating on X indicate that the model codenamed Ox Alpha is actually a new product from Zhipu AI's GLM series. Early scores are approaching Mythos level, leading industry speculation that the final name will be GLM-5. This is merely unilateral testing by developers; the official team has not confirmed it, and both naming and release timing remain uncertain. If the benchmark scores hold up, domestic large models will, for the first time, qualify to compete against top-tier overseas closed-source models, requiring a recalculation of pricing and inference cost structures, and rewriting Zhipu's own valuation story. Zhipu's strategy has always been parallel tracks of open source and commercialization. If the new model truly reaches the Mythos tier, the open-source ecosystem gains another competitive flagship option, significantly lowering migration costs for developers. For domestic model vendors, this rumor itself is a signal: the arms race among top players has reached the doorstep of overseas flagships, potentially accelerating the overall pace of model releases in the second half of the year.
NVIDIA introduced the Switchyard router, capable of dynamically rearranging model combinations mid-task execution. Official self-tests show it compresses task costs to one-third of the original. Model routing turns selecting models by difficulty into a productizable capability, offering a new path for reducing inference-side costs and thickening the stickiness of NVIDIA's software stack. For developers, money-saving tricks that previously required proprietary middleware are now standard, out-of-the-box features. NVIDIA is already treating inference infrastructure like model gateways as a new growth point, moving from selling compute power to selling compute scheduling capabilities, expanding the imagination for its business model. The routing layer is the cash register of the model era; whoever makes this layer the default option controls the accounting rights for inference traffic. Switchyard targets not just its own models but cross-vendor scheduling, effectively holding the routing standards in hand, which poses pressure and serves as a reference for other inference service providers.
JPMorgan's latest report points out that Alibaba Cloud's current 12% profit margin is undervalued. Capital expenditure has ramped up quickly over past quarters, with massive GPUs and data centers just coming online, still in a 60% utilization ramp-up phase, yielding only ~6% ROIC for the first year of batches. Extrapolating via stacked vintage models, mature-state ROIC should approach 20%, suggesting the market's valuation based on current status may be systematically low. The report's logic is that ramp-up period financial statements miss potential returns from assets already online; once utilization peaks, profit elasticity will release concentratedly. For Alibaba, if this logic is accepted by the market, the revaluation of cloud business will directly lift the overall valuation center, providing a new reference for valuing domestic cloud vendors. The report also notes that Alibaba Cloud's revenue structure is tilting toward AI services, whose gross margins and growth rates differ from traditional IaaS, warranting separate analysis.
Amazon's planned gas-fired power plant for its AI data center in Texas has been approved, with a total installed capacity of 7.65GW composed of 35 gas turbines. Annual emission authorization is approximately 33 million tons of greenhouse gases, potentially making it the largest single carbon emission source in the US. Self-built AI power plants are becoming the new normal, bringing conflicts between compute expansion, grid load, and carbon neutrality goals to the forefront. On one side, exploding electricity demand from data centers; on the other, grid construction cycles can't keep up. Cloud vendors building their own power plants is shifting from isolated cases to industry convention. When electricity becomes a hard constraint on compute expansion, whoever locks in power first locks in the next round of data center orders. For environmental groups and surrounding communities, this authorization implies a commitment to continuous emissions for decades, with legal battles over plant siting just beginning.
📰 EastVoice — today's AI headlines, decoded
Five minutes a day, the global AI shift →