Solana picked up an infrastructure vote of confidence on Wednesday after Alibaba Cloud used a Hong Kong keynote to demo “high-performance” Solana RPC connectivity, framing the work as part of its broader push to fuse AI tooling with Web3 developer workflows.
Alibaba Flexes Solana RPC ThroughputThe remarks landed alongside Alibaba Cloud’s broader messaging around its Qwen family of models, positioned by the company as a general-purpose LLM stack that can be used for coding, assistants, and multimodal workflows.
The more market-relevant part of the demo was the latency claim. Zhao described a setup where users connect to RPC nodes through Alibaba Cloud’s backbone network rather than via general public internet routes.
In a table shown during the talk, he said a “get slot” RPC call latency was reduced from roughly 25 milliseconds to about 10 milliseconds under the backbone-network approach, calling it “a huge reduction.” For “get block,” described as a 4MB block payload, he said latency fell from “more than 200 milliseconds” to “less than 200 milliseconds,” while emphasizing stability and suitability for low-latency workloads.
Alibaba Cloud also leaned into geography. Zhao pointed to the firm’s global footprint, highlighting regions such as Frankfurt, the US, and multiple Asia-Pacific hubs including Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as a “perfect match” for Solana’s builder base and latency-sensitive applications.
At press time, SOL traded at $81.
