Alibaba Cloud cuts prices again, this time for international customers as AI generates surging demand

The international cloud business of Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, is facing headwinds from geopolitical tensions and a lack of access to advanced chips. Company chairman Joe Tsai said in a recent interview that US restrictions on the exports of advanced chips from Nvidia “affected our cloud business and our ability to provide high-end computing services to customers”.

In the company’s latest round of price cuts, the cloud service provider’s international customers will see an average reduction of 23 per cent across five categories of core public cloud products using Alibaba’s data centres out of mainland China: compute, storage, network, database and big data products. The price reductions will take immediate effect, the company announced at its Spring Launch event on Monday.

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In February, Alibaba Cloud announced price reductions as high as 55 per cent for more than 100 core products for mainland China customers, the largest discount offering in the company’s history.

“Our latest pricing strategy is designed not only to reward long-term subscribers with more substantial discounts, but also to ensure that businesses can have a stable foundation to develop their long-term strategies when planning and developing their own AI applications,” Selina Yuan, president of international business for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said at Monday’s event.

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