On March 18, Alibaba Cloud officially announced an increase in the prices of its AI computing power and storage products, with the highest increase reaching 34%. This move marks that the cost of cloud infrastructure for the era of large model applications has entered a phase of dynamic adjustment.

This pricing adjustment covers core product lines such as underlying computing cards and high-performance storage. The price of computing card products such as Tengxun Zhenwu 810E increased by 5% to 34%, and the underlying file storage product CPFS (Intelligent Computing Edition) designed for intelligent computing scenarios also saw a 30% increase. Alibaba Cloud stated that the continuous surge in global AI demand leading to rising supply chain costs is the direct cause of this price fluctuation.

Alibaba Cloud

Notably, the exponential growth in Token usage has become a key factor behind this pricing adjustment. Data shows that Alibaba Cloud's MaaS (Model as a Service) platform "Bailian" achieved the highest growth rate in its history during the first quarter of this year. As a result, Alibaba Cloud is strategically allocating scarce AI computing resources toward the Token business to prioritize the needs of large model inference and application layers.

From an industry perspective, as generative AI shifts from R&D to large-scale implementation, the scarcity of computing resources is being transmitted from the upstream chip end to downstream cloud service providers. Alibaba Cloud's pricing adjustment not only reflects the tight balance of computing power supply and demand but also indicates that cloud vendors are trying to optimize resource allocation through price leverage to cope with challenges of high concurrency and high growth in model calls.