Alibaba Cloud cuts prices by up to 50% for core, storage products

Alibaba’s (9988.HK) cloud computing branch will drop rates by up to 50% starting Wednesday to compete for a larger share of China’s cloud market amid increased competition.

Alibaba Cloud’s website says elastic computing services, which can swiftly increase or decrease processing, using Arm and Intel-based chips will drop 15% to 20%, while services utilizing Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) V100 and T4 graphics processing units will drop 41% to 47%.

Zhang Yi, who studies China’s cloud computing business at Canalys, said the price reduction may entice customers, but their impact will depend on the services customers buy.

Alibaba Cloud, one of China’s first cloud computing companies, supplies about one-third of the sector.

China Unicom (0762.HK) and China Telecom (0728.HK) have increased competitiveness in recent years.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (9988.HK) announced a six-way business division split in late March to allow Alibaba Cloud and other companies to raise money separately.

On Wednesday, Alibaba announced that over 200,000 companies have requested beta testing for Tongyi Qianwen, an AI-powered large language model.

Alibaba Cloud will join with Tongyi Qianwen to let select organizations retrain the model with their own intelligence to create industry-specific apps.

The program’s initial seven companies are China National Petroleum Corp (CNPET.UL) and China International Capital Corp (3908.HK) subsidiaries.