Alibaba prices Wan3.0 video at a quarter of Veo 3.1's rate

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab has put a number on how much it wants to undercut Google in generative video: $0.20 per second at 1080p for Wan3.0, against $0.40 for the standard tier of Google's Veo 3.1. At the lower 480p tier, Wan3.0 runs $0.05 a second. For a minute of top-quality footage, that's $12 — a pricing gap aimed squarely at studios, ad agencies and marketers choosing between the two.

Wan3.0 went into public beta on 6 August 2026 and became generally available on 24 August, according to TechNode. It generates clips up to 30 seconds long — double the 15-second cap of the prior Wan2.7-Video — at 480p, 720p or 1080p, with synchronised audio produced in the same pass by default, including realistic faces, micro-expressions and voices across several languages. An "intelligent duration" feature recommends a clip length, and outputs can be extended afterwards.

The model also takes inputs beyond prompts: documents of up to 50 pages, spreadsheets, slides and web pages can be converted directly into video. A feature called "Omni-Reference" accepts up to 20 references — images, video, audio, documents or web pages — and keeps them visually consistent across a generation. Alibaba points to short dramas, film, advertising, tourism, marketing, music videos, and synthetic training video for self-driving cars and robotics as the target uses.

Unlike the open-weight Wan line, which stops at Wan 2.2, Wan3.0 is closed and available only through Alibaba's Model Studio API, currently in preview, as The Next Web reported.

The timing is pointed. Wan3.0 arrived days after Alibaba completed a $10 billion share placement to fund AI spending — the largest-ever primary follow-on offering by a Hong Kong-listed company, according to Reuters.

Alibaba is using fresh capital to buy share in a market Google has led on quality. A price cut of this size — half Veo 3.1's per-second rate at matching resolution — is a direct bid for enterprise video-generation budgets in advertising and media production, markets where cost per clip compounds fast at scale. Making Wan3.0 closed and API-only, breaking from Alibaba's open-weight tradition, signals the company wants to monetise this model directly rather than seed an ecosystem around it. The document-to-video and multi-reference features aim at production teams who need brand consistency, a segment Google has not emphasised as clearly. Watch whether Google responds on price, and whether the $10bn raise shows up in further model releases from Tongyi Lab.