Alibaba Cloud cuts prices for international clients
Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit has slashed prices for international customers by up to 59 per cent, as the tech giant fights to woo users amid a global race for computing resources driven by the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI).
The international cloud business of Alibaba, which owns the Post, is facing headwinds from geopolitical tensions and a lack of access to advanced chips.
Chairman Joe Tsai recently said American restrictions on the exports of advanced chips from Nvidia “affected our cloud business and our ability to provide high-end computing services to customers”.
In the company’s latest round of price cuts, the cloud service provider’s international customers will see an average reduction of 23 per cent across five categories of core public cloud products using Alibaba’s data centres out of China: compute, storage, network, database and big data products.
The price cuts would take immediate effect, the company announced at its Spring Launch event yesterday.
The reductions, which follow cuts for domestic customers in February, reflect the firm’s efforts to attract customers as the adoption of AI picks up steam across a multitude of industries.
In February, Alibaba Cloud announced price reductions of as much as 55 per cent for more than 100 core products for Chinese customers, the largest discount offered in the company’s history.
In the previous round last May, the cloud unit slashed prices on a number of core products and services in China by up to 50 per cent.
“Our latest pricing strategy is designed not only to reward longterm subscribers with more substantial discounts, but also to ensure businesses can have a stable foundation to develop their long-term strategies when planning and developing their own AI applications,” Selina Yuan, president of international business for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said at yesterday’s event.
The cloud business and Alibaba’s e-commerce business were highlighted by Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming in February as the group’s two core interests, after the tech giant announced a sweeping corporate restructuring a year ago amid a tough macro environment.
Alibaba Cloud is currently the biggest player in the country in terms of customer spending among cloud infrastructure service providers. It serves 80 per cent of China’s technology firms and half of the companies involved in the development of large language models, the technology used to train generative AI services such as ChatGPT.
As of the fourth quarter, its global market share lagged behind that of US rivals including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which accounted for 31 per cent, 26 per cent and 10 per cent of the market, respectively, according to research firm Canalys.