Chinese internet behemoth Alibaba is often left out of hyperscaler conversations – unfairly cast aside by the US-centric cloud computing triopoly of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Being results season, Faultline has taken a look at the latest earnings from all four of these cloud computing colossi. In Alibaba’s latest earnings report, the company has highlighted an important trend. The Alibaba Cloud division has just reported effectively flat year on year growth of just 4% in the second quarter of 2023. However, EBITDA for the same business, same product, same technology, somehow spiked by 106% in the same period. CEO Daniel Zhang felt it necessary to explain the phenomenon to investors on the Q2 earnings call. The slowdown in…