On August 3, Artificial Analysis estimated that DeepSeek's V4-Flash averaged $0.03 to complete each test in its benchmark suite while scoring 50 on its Intelligence Index, matching Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash. The index combines nine coding, reasoning, and workplace tests, and V4-Flash costs $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens. Alibaba Cloud's AI Gateway supports DeepSeek V4 APIs, and Alibaba unveiled its 2.4-trillion-parameter Qwen3.8-Max on August 3, sending its Hong Kong shares up 7%. Alibaba's cloud revenue grew 38% in the March quarter, external cloud revenue rose 40%, and AI products reached 30% of external cloud sales, though group revenue rose only 3% and Alibaba plans to exceed its earlier RMB380 billion three-year AI commitment. Google Cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8 billion in Q2 2026, with operating margin expanding to 35.6%. Insider Monkey's database showed 222 hedge funds holding Alphabet at the end of Q1 2026, up from 214 in Q4 2025. Alibaba's July 15 short interest was 42.14 million shares, 2.01% of float, with 2.8 days to cover. The investment conclusion is that Alibaba offers more speculative upside if cheap models win