Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax and DeepSeek bring AI token subscriptions to Tmall's retail storefronts
Following Zhipu's own Tmall flagship store covered September 6, Alibaba's Tmall has now opened an 'AI Space Station' storefront selling token packs, coding-plan subscriptions and pay-as-you-go packages from Alibaba Cloud, Zhipu AI, Kimi (Moonshot) and MiniMax, while Zhipu and DeepSeek also run their own Tmall flagship stores — Zhipu's plans run 118 to 1,078 yuan per month. SCMP frames this as a new consumer front in Chinese labs' push for sustainable revenue, packaging tokens and coding plans like everyday retail goods.
Why it matters
Turns the single-store experiment into a lab-wide trend: China's frontier labs now compete for consumer subscribers through e-commerce retail, a distribution channel no US lab uses, driven by listing-era revenue pressure.
Importance: 2/5
Continuation of the Sep 6 Zhipu Tmall-store story, now with four labs selling subscriptions through retail