Up to 34%! Alibaba Cloud AI computing power and storage products announce price increases

CSRC Daily, China Securities Network reported (Reporter: Yang Xiangfei). On March 18, the official Alibaba Cloud website released an announcement: due to a surge in global AI demand and rising supply-chain costs, some of Alibaba Cloud’s AI compute and storage products will see increases of up to 34%.

Specifically, this round of price hikes from Alibaba Cloud includes: compute card products such as the Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E increasing by 5%-34%; and file storage products, including CPFS (Zhicai Edition), increasing by 30%.

Insiders revealed that another important reason for this round of price hikes is a sharp surge in Token usage. During the Spring Festival, AI Agent applications took off. Alibaba Cloud’s MaaS business, Bailian, achieved the highest growth rate in its history from January to March this year. Alibaba Cloud is now directing scarce AI compute resources toward Token businesses. This means that China’s largest cloud provider, Alibaba Cloud, is adjusting the focus of its commercial strategy—shifting from selling compute resources to selling intelligence—by leveraging its self-developed Qwen large model.

On March 16, Alibaba established a brand-new business group, Alibaba Token Hub (ATH), with Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming personally responsible. ATH includes Tongyi Lab, the MaaS business line, the Qwen business division, the Wukong business division, and the AI innovation business division, covering a complete setup from basic model research and development and model service platforms to AI applications for both individual and enterprise users. At the same time, Alibaba will build a unified model service platform, Bailian, with Alibaba Cloud providing MaaS commercialization services externally.

In an internal email that day, Eddie Wu Yongming said: “We are on the eve of the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) explosion. A large amount of digital work will be supported by hundreds of billions of AI Agents, and these AI Agents will be powered and run by Tokens generated from models, becoming the main medium through which humans interact with the digital world.”

It is reported that this year, major overseas cloud providers have also gradually raised prices for core cloud products. On January 22, AWS announced a 15% price increase for EC2 instances used for large model training. On January 27, Google Cloud announced price increases for services including data transfer, AI, and compute infrastructure, with the maximum increase reaching 100%.