China’s artificial intelligence developers are competing for paying users on a new consumer front: Alibaba Group Holding’s Tmall, where AI subscription plans are now being sold alongside smartphones, skincare and luxury fashion brands.
Moonshot AI, developer of the Kimi K3 model, and MiniMax were in talks to open official flagship stores on the e-commerce platform, people familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post on Monday. The move comes as AI developers look for new channels to convert soaring user numbers into recurring revenue.
Beijing-based Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, kicked off the trend last week by opening an online storefront selling subscriptions to its GLM Coding Plan. A day later, Tmall launched an “AI Space Station”, a central marketplace where users can buy AI subscriptions, top up tokens and purchase specialised packages from Alibaba Cloud, Z.ai, MiniMax and DeepSeek.
Early market signals have been positive. Within 48 hours of Z.ai opening its storefront, transactions involving AI tokens and subscription products across Taobao and Tmall jumped by more than 160 per cent, a Tmall spokesperson told the SCMP on Monday.
The digital marketplace packages cutting-edge AI services in a familiar consumer format, similar to topping up a prepaid mobile phone plan. While Alibaba Cloud and Z.ai run their own storefronts, packages for Kimi, MiniMax and DeepSeek are currently sold through third-party vendors.
By putting access to models on digital retail shelves, Chinese developers are turning software subscriptions into everyday retail products and could become less reliant on direct website sales.
Poe Zhao, a China technology analyst and founder of Hello China Tech, said Tmall gave developers a more efficient channel to acquire paying users, but with a trade-off, as it made them “more dependent on traffic controlled by the platform”.