Definition
Model-as-a-Service – A cloud provider hosts AI models (its own or third-party open-weight ones) and sells access to them by usage, typically priced per token through an API, so customers do not run the model infrastructure themselves. Revenue scales with inference demand and depends on the provider's compute capacity, and margins are driven by how efficiently that compute is used and how the access is priced; Alibaba sells this through its Model Studio platform. Found In: Earnings call or segment commentary (not a financial-statement line item)