China's Alibaba Cloud cuts prices by up to 50% in bid to lure customers

Alibaba Cloud has announced that it will be cutting the cost of some of its cloud services even as global cloud consumers continue to cry over the high cost of the cloud. Both Microsoft and Google have increased the prices of some of their services this year.

Experts believe the move is part of the company’s efforts to reel in more customers as it prepares to go public. Early this month, we reported that the Alibaba group of companies was splitting into 6 branches and Alibaba Cloud has been touted as the most promising subsidiary.

Some of the products that will see a reduction in prices include Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Object Storage Service (OSS), network, database, Content Delivery Network (CDN), and security products available in the Chinese market. Yes, unfortunately only Chinese consumers will be benefiting from the price drop.

“The decision is in line with Alibaba Cloud's commitment to making computing power more inclusive. This large-scale price reduction is to return more technological dividends to customers and partners, to continue to reduce the cost of using the cloud and expand the market space of the cloud,” a company spokesperson said.

Early this month, Alibaba also jumped into the generative AI race by launching its own AI large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen. The AI will be integrated into various Alibaba businesses with the goal to improve user experience. Additionally, customers and developers will have access to the model to create their own customised AI features.

Alibaba Cloud is tied to two other businesses – the DingTalk collaboration platform and Alibaba AI business – and together they form the Cloud Intelligence Group. Following Alibaba’s split, the group can raise external capital and also seek its own IPO.

Meanwhile, in the UK local cloud providers have started calling for the government’s competition watchdog to come to their rescue in what they believe is unfair play by the three biggest cloud providers.