Alibaba Cloud today informed users it will increase prices for many services by up to 34 percent.<\/p>\n
\u201cDue to the surge in global AI demand and rising supply chain costs, the procurement costs of core hardware in the industry have increased significantly,\u201d states a price adjustment<\/a> notice posted on Wednesday. \u201cAfter careful evaluation, we have decided to adjust the prices of services,\u201d it adds.<\/p>\n Updated price lists record dozens of services and instance types for which costs will rise by five percent. The cost of higher-end instances powered by GPUs will rise by 25 to 34 percent. Even instances running Alibaba\u2019s own software, like the PolarDB cloud-native database, cop the price rise.<\/p>\n The cost of using accelerators in the Chinese cloud will rise by five to 30 percent. The increases even apply to Alibaba\u2019s homebrew Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E, a parallel-processing ASIC for AI applications said to match Nvidia\u2019s dumbed-down-for-China H20 GPU.<\/p>\n Alibaba\u2019s notice says customers who purchased relevant services before April 18 2026, \u201cwill not be affected by this adjustment in your current order\/billing cycle; the new price will apply at the start of your next renewal cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n That appears to be good news for some Alibaba Cloud customers, as the outfit allows customers to subscribe to cloud services for one-or two-year terms, and in increments of three, six, and nine months.<\/p>\n Alibaba\u2019s price hikes are probably reasonable in the context of surging memory prices<\/a> which create unavoidable cost increases.<\/p>\n Hiking prices for compute, however, looks a little opportunistic given last November Alibaba Cloud said<\/a> it can\u2019t install servers fast enough to keep up with demand, and was rationing access to GPUs for customers who spend more money. The Chinese cloud has also previously claimed to possess resource optimization prowess that let it operate more efficiently than rival clouds.<\/a><\/p>\n