E-commerce and tech giant Alibaba’s cloud computing division will cut prices for its products and services by up to 50% starting Wednesday, stepping up efforts to fight for a bigger slice of China’s cloud market amid rising competition.
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% to 20%, while services using Nvidia’s V100 and T4 graphics processing units will drop between 41% to 47%.
The price cuts are aimed at expanding Alibaba Cloud’s user base and market penetration, business news outlet Securities Times reported on Wednesday.
Alibaba Cloud was one of China’s earliest domestic entrants into cloud computing, and currently supplies more than one-third of the sector in China.
However, in recent years the company has faced intensifying competition from Chinese carriers including China Unicom and China Telecom.
In late March Alibaba Group Holding Ltd announced a six-way breakup for its business divisions that would allow Alibaba Cloud and other units to raise funding independently.
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.
Registrations for the service were opened earlier in April.
