Alibaba Cloud vs Scaleway: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence

Full comparison of Alibaba Cloud and Scaleway — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Updated July 2026.

Alibaba Cloud

Qwen — frontier open-weight models with competitive pricing

Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model family spans from budget-tier Qwen-Turbo to the frontier Qwen3-235B MoE reasoning model. Qwen3 models are fully open-weight, making them popular for self-hosted deployments. The API is available via Alibaba's DashScope platform with competitive per-token pricing.

CodingReasoningMultilingualVisionCost-sensitive workloads

Proprietary modelsHosts open weights

Scaleway

French cloud provider with sovereign EU LLM inference

Scaleway is a French cloud provider offering GPU compute and LLM inference with a focus on European data sovereignty. Their Generative APIs service hosts Llama 3.3 and other open-weight models, making them a strong choice for European businesses with data residency requirements.

European complianceFrench data sovereigntyGDPROpen-sourceGPU compute

Open-weight hostHosts open weights

Key metrics

Cheapest input ($/1M)

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Cheapest output ($/1M)

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Peak throughput

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Best latency (TTFT)

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Intelligence score

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Context window

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Live token pricing

Strengths & weaknesses

Alibaba Cloud

Qwen3-235B rivals GPT-4o on reasoning benchmarks

Open-weight models available for self-hosting

Competitive pricing — Qwen-Turbo at $0.05/1M input

Strong multilingual support including Chinese

Vision-language models (Qwen2.5-VL) with strong OCR

API primarily optimised for Asian markets — latency may be higher in US/EU

Less third-party integration support than OpenAI

Documentation quality varies by model version

Scaleway

French cloud — strongest EU data sovereignty credentials

GDPR-compliant with data centres in France and Netherlands

GPU compute + LLM inference from one provider

Competitive pricing for European market

Long-established cloud provider (founded 1999)

Smaller model catalog than US-based inference providers

Lower throughput than speed-optimised providers

Less developer tooling than OpenAI or Anthropic

Key differentiators

Alibaba Cloud

Qwen3-235B is a 235B MoE open-weight model that matches frontier closed models on reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

Scaleway

The strongest European data sovereignty credentials — a French company with French data centres, ideal for organisations with strict EU data residency requirements.

Frequently asked questions

Alibaba Cloud FAQs

What is the Qwen model family?

Qwen is Alibaba's family of large language models ranging from Qwen-Turbo (budget) to Qwen3-235B (frontier MoE). Qwen3 models support hybrid thinking mode, toggling between fast responses and deep chain-of-thought reasoning.

Are Qwen models open-weight?

Yes. Qwen3 models (including the 235B MoE) are released under open licenses and available on Hugging Face. This makes them popular for self-hosted deployments where data privacy or cost control is a priority.

How does Qwen3-235B compare to GPT-4o?

Qwen3-235B-A22B is a 235B parameter MoE model that activates 22B parameters per token. It scores competitively with GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet on coding and reasoning benchmarks, at significantly lower API cost.

Scaleway FAQs

Is Scaleway GDPR-compliant?

Yes. Scaleway is a French company with data centres in France and the Netherlands. All data stays within the EU, making it one of the strongest options for GDPR compliance and French data sovereignty requirements.

What LLM models does Scaleway offer?

Scaleway's Generative APIs service hosts Llama 3.3 and other open-weight models. Their catalog is focused on the most widely-used open-source models.

How does Scaleway compare to Nebius AI for European inference?

Both are European providers with GDPR-compliant infrastructure. Scaleway has stronger French data sovereignty credentials (French company, French data centres) while Nebius AI has a larger model catalog and more inference-focused infrastructure.

Provider resources

Alibaba Cloud

Provider page Website Pricing Docs

Scaleway

Provider page Website Pricing Docs

Alibaba Cloud — Qwen — frontier open-weight models with competitive pricing

Qwen3-235B is a 235B MoE open-weight model that matches frontier closed models on reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

Scaleway — French cloud provider with sovereign EU LLM inference

The strongest European data sovereignty credentials — a French company with French data centres, ideal for organisations with strict EU data residency requirements.

Key strengths compared

Alibaba Cloud

▸Qwen3-235B rivals GPT-4o on reasoning benchmarks
▸Open-weight models available for self-hosting
▸Competitive pricing — Qwen-Turbo at $0.05/1M input

Scaleway

▸French cloud — strongest EU data sovereignty credentials
▸GDPR-compliant with data centres in France and Netherlands
▸GPU compute + LLM inference from one provider

Provider category context

Alibaba Cloud is a frontier lab, founded in 2009 (AI division 2023). Scaleway is a cloud, founded in 1999. The category difference means these providers serve partially overlapping use cases — compare the model lists and pricing tables above to find the best fit for your specific workload.

How to choose between them

Choose Alibaba Cloud if you need qwen3-235b rivals gpt-4o on reasoning benchmarks. Choose Scaleway if you need french cloud — strongest eu data sovereignty credentials. For high-volume production workloads, run a cost comparison using the token pricing table above with your actual prompt/completion token ratio — the cheapest provider depends heavily on your input-to-output token ratio.