MiniMax raises the ceiling on its Alibaba Cloud agreement

A larger allowance for cloud purchases

MiniMax increased the ceiling on its three-year Alibaba Cloud agreement to US$1.2 billion, according to the South China Morning Post's account of its Hong Kong filings. The annual limits are now $300 million for 2026, $400 million for 2027 and $500 million for 2028.

The previous limits were $115 million, $125 million and $135 million. Added together, those total $375 million; the new total is $825 million higher, or a 220% increase. These are calculations from the reported annual caps, not a disclosure of actual spending in each year.

Training and inference both consume capacity

The agreement covers cloud resources used in developing and serving models. Training expenditure supports model iteration, while inference expenditure supports the requests made by applications and customers. Both can increase as a model business grows, but they enter the commercial story differently.

MiniMax's own first-half results say research-and-development expenses increased partly because of cloud services used for training. The company also attributes rising platform revenue to greater API activity and adoption of its subscription offering. Together, those disclosures explain why computing demand can rise on both sides of the business.

How much additional room the revision creates

The increase is uneven across the three years. The 2026 cap rises by $185 million, the 2027 cap by $275 million and the 2028 cap by $365 million. Calculated from the reported figures, those increases are about 161%, 220% and 270%, respectively. The larger later-year allowance is therefore more than a simple extension of the original annual budget.

If the reported two-thirds utilization of the old 2026 limit is used as an approximation, purchases by June were about $77 million. The remaining room would have been roughly $38 million under the old cap and $223 million under the new one. These estimates illustrate contractual headroom only; they are not a replacement for the company’s exact transaction ledger.

Do not confuse a cap with cash paid

The SCMP report says MiniMax had used roughly two-thirds of its earlier current-year cloud budget by the end of June. Raising the limit creates room for additional purchases. It does not mean the entire $1.2 billion has been ordered, paid or recognized as an expense.

For a clear financial picture, the useful comparison is actual cloud spending, the accounting treatment of that spending and the revenue or research outcomes it supports. A multi-year purchasing ceiling alone cannot establish cash burn or the cost of producing a particular model.

The announcement is therefore a capacity and contracting signal: MiniMax expects enough demand to seek materially more headroom from Alibaba Cloud. Subsequent financial disclosures will show how much of that headroom it uses.

Demand is measured in workloads as well as revenue

In the half-year release, CEO Yan Junjie says July token consumption was 20 times January’s level. That is a management-reported usage comparison after the reporting period, not a 20-fold increase in recognized revenue or a disclosure that every token ran on Alibaba hardware.

This distinction matters because a cloud agreement serves multiple activities: experiments can consume capacity before producing a sale, while inference demand can grow as prices or product usage change. The higher annual limits give MiniMax contracting flexibility across those workloads. They do not identify the unit cost, hardware mix or supplier share behind the reported token growth.