Advertisement
Alibaba
TechBig Tech

Alibaba’s cloud computing unit cuts prices on 100 core products in China to capture more users involved in AI development projects

  • Alibaba Cloud on Thursday slashed prices by up to 55 per cent on more than 100 core products in its largest discount offering to date
  • The initiative seeks to ‘lower the threshold of cloud services for more enterprises and developers’ in China, where AI projects are driving demand

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
3
Alibaba Cloud currently operates 89 availability zones –where it operates data centres – in 30 regions globally, supporting more than 4 million customers worldwide. Photo: Reuters
Kelly Le
Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit has cut prices by up to 55 per cent on more than 100 core products – the largest discount offering in the company’s history – to attract more enterprises and software developers as users in mainland China, as the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) picks up steam across various industries.
Advertisement
This new campaign, which offers an average 20 per cent reduction in prices, took effect on Thursday and includes the unit’s elastic compute service (ECS), object storage service (OSS) and database product categories, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement. Hangzhou-based parent Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The initiative seeks to “lower the threshold of cloud services for more enterprises and developers”, according to Liu Weiguang, the president of public cloud business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

“With the rapidly increasing amount of data in China, businesses will need robust, high-performance and cost-effective computing power to help handle and analyse the data before turning them into actionable intelligence,” Liu said. “This is where we can help, as we aim to become the most open cloud [platform] and help our customers to turn AI into productivity.”

A roomful of high-performance servers are seen stacked inside a data centre run by Alibaba Cloud in mainland China. Photo: Handout
A roomful of high-performance servers are seen stacked inside a data centre run by Alibaba Cloud in mainland China. Photo: Handout
Cloud computing technology enables companies to distribute, manage or process over the internet a range of software and other digital resources as an on-demand service, just like electricity from a power grid. These resources are stored inside data centres.
Advertisement

Prices of Alibaba Cloud’s ECS, which provides users with virtual cloud servers, has been cut up to 36 per cent, while those for OSS – a service to store and access any amount of data from anywhere – was slashed up to 55 per cent. For database product categories, prices were reduced up to 40 per cent. Both existing and new customers can avail of the discounted prices, according to Alibaba Cloud.

Advertisement