E-commerce and tech giant Alibaba’s cloud computing division will cut prices for its products and services by up to 50 percent starting Wednesday.
According to Alibaba Cloud’s website, prices for elastic computing services – the ability to quickly expand or decrease processing – using Arm and Intel-based chips will drop by 15 percent to 20 percent, while services using Nvidia’s V100 and T4 graphics processing units will drop between 41 percent to 47 percent.
The price cuts are one way for the company to attract more customers, said Zhang Yi, who tracks China’s cloud computing sector at research firm Canalys, though their actual impact will depend on the specific services clients buy.
Alibaba Cloud was one of China’s earliest domestic entrants into cloud computing, and supplies more than one-third of the sector in China.
Alibaba Cloud faced competition from Chinese carriers including China Unicom and China Telecom in its cloud business.
Separately, Alibaba stated on Wednesday that more than 200,000 enterprises have requested beta testing for Tongyi Qianwen, the company’s AI-powered large language model.
Alibaba Cloud will begin a partnership program for Tongyi Qianwen, allowing select companies to retrain the model with their own intelligence to create industry-specific applications.
The seven companies comprising the program’s initial stage include subdivisions of China National Petroleum and China International Capital.
Alibaba Cloud segment comprises Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk. Q3 revenue from Cloud segment before inter-segment elimination, which includes revenue from services provided to other Alibaba businesses, was $3.87 billion.
Q3 revenue after inter-segment elimination grew 3 percent to $2,925 million mainly driven by healthy public cloud growth, partially offset by declining hybrid cloud revenue, as we continue to drive high-quality, recurring revenue growth.
In December 2022, Alibaba Cloud commenced operation of its third data center in Japan to support the growing cloud service demands from customers in the country.
Alibaba Cloud added new data centers in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Thailand, South Korea and Japan in 2022. Alibaba Cloud now offers computing services in 28 regions and 86 availability zones globally.
