Alibaba hikes cloud GPU prices
Alibaba Cloud announced price increases of up to 34% starting July 1, blaming explosive AI demand and hardware shortages—marking a big reversal from years of cloud price deflation. That signals rising cloud GPU costs are now a sector-wide risk for AI infra budgets and on-prem planning. (techradar.com)
Alibaba posted an official price-adjustment notice on March 18, 2026 saying select AI compute products and CPFS storage will see new pricing effective April 18, 2026 (UTC+8). (alibabacloud.com) The notice identifies computing-card products — including Alibaba’s T‑Head Zhenwu 810E accelerator — with adjustments ranging from 5% to 34%, and lists a 30% increase for its Cloud Parallel File Storage (CPFS) offering. (technode.com) Updated internal price lists published with the notice show dozens of services moved by about 5% broadly while higher-end GPU‑powered instances face the steepest rises, reported at roughly 25%–34% in vendor summaries. (theregister.com) Alibaba’s announcement specifies that customers who purchased affected services before April 18 will not see changes during their current billing cycle and that the new rates apply from the start of the next renewal period. (alibabacloud.com) The March 2026 increases reverse a prior pricing stance: Alibaba cut public‑cloud prices by as much as 59% in April 2024, signalling a strategic shift back toward cost recovery for AI infrastructure. (alibabacloud.com)
