Alibaba Cloud increases prices by up to 34 percent

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The Chinese cloud provider Alibaba Cloud is adjusting prices for numerous services effective April 18, 2026. This particularly affects AI computing resources, storage services, and database products. The increases vary depending on the service, ranging from 5 to 34 percent.

Alibaba Cloud cites the sharply increased global demand for AI computing power and higher hardware procurement costs across the industry as reasons in its service announcement. It states literally that "due to the increase in global AI demand and rising supply chain costs," the "procurement costs for core hardware in the industry have risen significantly." After careful evaluation, the decision was made to adjust prices.

GPU instances particularly affected

While many services and instance types will become 5 percent more expensive, GPU-based high-end instances are hit much harder: here, the surcharges range from 25 to 34 percent. Specifically impacted are, among others, instances with T-Head's (Pingtouge) proprietary AI accelerator Zhenwu 810E, Alibaba's chip design subsidiary. These computing units are roughly comparable to Nvidia's H20 for the Chinese market.

Cloud Parallel File Storage (CPFS) in the AI Computing Edition for Lingjun will also become 30 percent pricier. PAI-Lingjun is Alibaba's PaaS offering for large AI training and HPC workloads. The platform integrates heterogeneous computing with Panjiu servers, RDMA networks, and CPFS storage, and is designed for training models with trillions of parameters. Furthermore, prices for the cloud-native database PolarDB are increasing.

Bailian drives resource demand

Another driver of the price adjustment is apparently the exploding usage of Alibaba's Model-as-a-Service platform Bailian. The provider recorded record growth in AI-related revenue and usage in the first quarter of 2026. Consequently, inference load is growing strongly, tying up significant computing resources. Alibaba is increasingly prioritizing these capacities, driving up costs for other services.

There is a transition period for existing customers: contracts concluded before April 18, 2026, will remain unchanged until the next renewal cycle – depending on the contract term, this means for one to two years or three to nine months. Alibaba Cloud has not announced any discounts or compensation for enterprise customers.

Global prices – Frankfurt also affected

The price adjustment applies globally. No regional differences are planned for the European market or the DACH region. Customers using Alibaba's data center in Frankfurt will face the same surcharges. Alibaba Cloud has been operating the site since 2016.

This move is part of an industry-wide trend. From April 1, hosting provider Hetzner is increasing its prices. Hetzner also justified this with drastically increased operating costs and higher procurement prices for new hardware, especially for RAM and SSDs.

(fo)