The recent advertisements on airport billboards are quite interesting——the one from Alibaba Cloud is enormous, with data showing it surpasses the combined total of the second to fourth places, truly leading by a wide margin. Not far away, I also saw Volcano Engine competing for advertising space.

Similarly, the AI advertisements are everywhere, but the approaches on both sides are completely different. Silicon Valley is a blooming scene, with model vendors, application developers, Agent frameworks, and toolchains—everyone can give it a try, making the ecosystem look very lively.

But the pattern of airport billboards in China reveals another reality: the entry threshold for AI has changed. It’s no longer about ideas or talent, but about computing power, cloud infrastructure, and enough financial endurance to keep burning. When high-end commercial positions are only contested by infrastructure players, the industry logic behind it becomes very clear—whoever controls the underlying computing power and cloud infrastructure holds the voice in this wave of AI.