On June 10, 2026, the smart home industry ushered in a major change.
Midea Group and Alibaba Group have reached an in-depth strategic cooperation, officially opening a new track of “whole-house intelligence + AI large model + business ecosystem”, which also means that the war for the next generation of smart homes has officially begun.
This cooperation is like two industry giants teaming up to play cards, each showing its strengths.
Midea has a full range of smart hardware for the whole house, as well as scene portals for hundreds of millions of households, providing a solid hardware foundation for the implementation of smart homes.
Alibaba has the most mature large models, computing power and cloud infrastructure, and occupies a leading position in the field of artificial intelligence.
The combination of the two is like a good hand of cards, which hits “explosion” as soon as it comes up.
For a long time, there have been some pain points in the smart home field.
Although smart devices in the past had a large number of hardware and relatively smooth connections, they lacked a core “intelligent brain” and users often had to issue instructions manually, making them inconvenient to use.
This time, Alibaba’s large model adds the core AI “brain” to smart homes, enabling the device to achieve true active intelligence.
For example, when the user returns home, the smart home system can automatically adjust the indoor temperature, light brightness, etc. according to the user’s daily habits without the user’s manual operation.
In terms of business ecology, in the past, hardware manufacturers focused on hardware production, while Internet manufacturers focused on algorithm research and development, each fighting on its own.
Now, Midea and Alibaba have directly formed a team to connect the entire chain of hardware, algorithms and business ecosystem.
This kind of cooperation model directly leaves behind those opponents who are still involved in single products.
The core cooperation content is very clear.
On June 10, the two parties signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly explore the next-generation business form of “whole-house intelligence + AI large model + business ecosystem”.
At the same time, we will deepen cooperation in key technological fields such as cloud infrastructure, computing power supply, advanced model capabilities, and data centers.
Of course, we also need to look at this cooperation clearly.
This is a powerful alliance between hardware giants and AI giants, with complementary advantages and a completely correct direction.
However, the competition in smart homes has entered deep water, and victory or defeat cannot be determined by one cooperation.
The final outcome still depends on the real user experience. Only users who are willing to pay are the real winners.
This incident also hits the core trend of the smart home industry.
The smart home industry should focus less on the gimmicks of individual products and more on the implementation of full-scenario intelligence.
In the second half of smart home, the competition is about the deep integration of hardware and AI, as well as the full ecological capabilities.
So, can the combination of Midea and Alibaba succeed in the smart home market?
Is your smart home really smart enough?
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