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The cloud-computing units of Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu are raising prices for certain services by as much as 34 per cent, following similar moves by their American peers earlier this year as artificial intelligence demand and infrastructure costs rise.
Starting April 18, Alibaba Cloud’s services running on its AI chips – such as the T-Head Zhengwu 810E unveiled in late January – would cost between 5 and 34 per cent more, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The price of its Cloud Parallel File Storage service will rise by 30 per cent. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Meanwhile, Baidu Cloud said on Wednesday that it would increase the price of its AI computing power related services by around 5 to 30 per cent, and its parallel file storage system by 30 per cent. The changes will also take effect on April 18.

Cui Tingting, a research manager at IDC China, described the price increases as “a reasonable response to evolving market conditions”.
She said that demand for computing power had surged amid an intensifying global AI race, while many major AI infrastructure players had announced plans to increase strategic investment in the field over the next three to five years.
“With a massive future supply gap [anticipated], hardware suppliers are accelerating price rises in response to shifting supply-demand forecasts, which in turn exacerbates the upward trend in supply chain costs, driving up costs in the cloud-computing market,” Cui said.
Major US cloud service providers raised their prices earlier this year.
Google announced increases of up to 100 per cent for certain services – including CDN Interconnect and Direct Peering for North American users – from May 1, while Amazon Web Services raised rates for its EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML service by about 15 per cent globally.
Cui said that further price increases could not be ruled out if supply chain costs continued to climb. Cloud providers were also factoring in mandatory future expenditure on research and development and market operations, she added.
“It is worth noting that the recent escalation of tensions in the Middle East has, to some extent, affected the supply of energy, chemicals and metal raw materials essential for hardware production, which may further exacerbate global hardware supply shortages,” Cui said.
Tencent Cloud last week ended its limited-time free public beta for the GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5 and Kimi 2.5 models.
It also increased prices for its Hunyuan series – the HY2.0 Instruct and HY2.0 Think models – raising token costs more than fivefold.
Tencent on Wednesday did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the price increase would extend to other relevant services.
Alibaba Cloud led China’s AI cloud services sector in the first half of 2025 with a 36 per cent market share. ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud followed with 15, 13 and 7 per cent, respectively, according to market intelligence provider Omdia.


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The Chinese firms’ price increases are ‘a reasonable response to evolving market conditions’, says IDC China analyst Cui Tingting


The Chinese firms’ price increases are ‘a reasonable response to evolving market conditions’, says IDC China analyst Cui Tingting.


Alibaba and Baidu lift cloud prices by up to 34% amid AI demand surge

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Chinese firms’ price increases are ‘a reasonable response to evolving market conditions’, says IDC China analyst Cui Tingting

The Chinese firms’ price increases are ‘a reasonable response to evolving market conditions’, says IDC China analyst Cui Tingting