- Alibaba Cloud has cut the price of its offshore data centre products by 59% in a bid to attract AI developers.
- Meanwhile, products related to computing, storage, networking, databases and big data will be reduced by an average of 23%.
- The price cut marks Alibaba’s latest effort to entice developers to use its cloud services to build data-intensive AI models and applications.
Option in the price war
China’s Alibaba Cloud said on Monday it would cut prices for products powered by its offshore data centres by as much as 59% amid growing competition to attract artificial intelligence software developers. The cloud service provider said that products related to computing, storage, networking, databases and big data will be reduced by an average of 23%.
More specifically, the Object Storage Service (OSS) resource plan (the name of Alibaba’s long-term agreement) dropped from $63 to $16.99. One – to three-year commitments from MaxCompute, Hologres, DataWorks, Real-time Compute Flink Edition, and Open Search were also cut by the same amount.
Alibaba Cloud also increased its free data transfer limit from 20 GB to 200 GB, which includes data moving in the cloud instead of export limits.
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Efforts to build data-intensive AI models and applications
This is the third time in the past 12 months that the cloud unit of Alibaba Group Holding, China’s e-commerce leader, has cut prices. Alibaba had already announced similar price cuts for domestic users in February.
The price cut marks Alibaba’s latest effort to entice developers to use its cloud services to build data-intensive AI models and applications.
The cloud giant announced products designed to help customers implement artificial intelligence. The first of these is a service for managing the integration and operation of large language models (LLMS) across model architectures and clouds. In addition, an AI computing platform for basic model training and inference, as well as other high-performance computing tasks, is offered, called PAI-Lingjun Intelligent Computing Services.
The service, which Alibaba Cloud claims offers “full-process AI engineering capabilities,” has already been launched in Singapore, supporting up to 100,000 cards in a single training cluster with a minimum latency of 1.5 microseconds and a maximum throughput of 20TB. The ultimate AI product is the energy expert, which calculates the carbon footprint and monitors and forecasts energy consumption.
