Solana Gets A Big Infra Signal As Alibaba Demos High-Performance RPCs
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 a part of its broader push to fuse AI tooling with Web3 developer workflows.
In a clip shared by Solana’s official X account, the demo got here throughout an Accelerate APAC 2026 keynote titled “Fueling Web3 Innovation with AI on Cloud,” delivered by Zhao Qingyuan of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group. The pitch was simple: scale back latency and operational overhead for builders who depend on quick, dependable RPC entry, particularly in trading-heavy use instances the place milliseconds can matter.
Alibaba Flexes Solana RPC Throughput
Zhao framed the speak as a sensible instance of how giant language fashions can compress growth cycles. In the keynote, he mentioned he not too long ago migrated a archive node away from a Google Bigtable setup to an Alibaba Cloud in-house database implementation over a weekend, leaning on AI-assisted coding regardless of restricted prior familiarity with Solana’s typical developer stack.
“Just this weekend, I spent two days — I migrated the Solana archive node from a Google Bigtable implementation to Alibaba Cloud’s in-house database implementation,” Zhao mentioned. “I haven’t even discovered Rust earlier than, and I simply used net coding to do that in two days. And it’s going to obtain the information from Hugging Face for the historic slots, and it’ll synchronize the information with the mainnet, and it will possibly present the RPC service.”
The remarks landed alongside Alibaba Cloud’s broader messaging round its Qwen household of fashions, positioned by the corporate as a general-purpose LLM stack that can be utilized for coding, assistants, and multimodal workflows.
The extra market-relevant a part of the demo was the latency declare. Zhao described a setup the place customers connect with RPC nodes by Alibaba Cloud’s spine community moderately than by way of normal public web routes.
In a desk proven throughout the speak, he mentioned a “get slot” RPC name latency was diminished from roughly 25 milliseconds to about 10 milliseconds below the backbone-network method, calling it “an enormous discount.” For “get block,” described as a 4MB block payload, he mentioned latency fell from “greater than 200 milliseconds” to “lower than 200 milliseconds,” whereas emphasizing stability and suitability for low-latency workloads.
JUST IN: Alibaba, the world’s largest ecommerce firm, demos high-performance Solana RPCs pic.twitter.com/wwqVLelqUv
— Solana (@solana) February 11, 2026
Alibaba Cloud additionally leaned into geography. Zhao pointed to the agency’s world footprint, highlighting areas reminiscent of Frankfurt, the US, and a number of Asia-Pacific hubs together with Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as a “excellent match” for Solana’s builder base and latency-sensitive purposes.
While the clip stops wanting saying a proper partnership or a productized Solana RPC offering with pricing or SLAs, the optics are notable: a serious cloud supplier utilizing a Solana ecosystem stage to publicly benchmark RPC latency enhancements, and explicitly tying that to buying and selling and “co-location for the high frequency calls.”
At press time, SOL traded at $81.
