Selina Yuan, President of the International Business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, introduces new pricing strategy at the Alibaba Cloud Spring Launch. Photo credit: Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud is slashing the price of core public cloud products for international customers to support long-term AI growth, the company announced during its Spring Launch virtual summit on Monday.
The new pricing strategy covers five core public cloud product categories in markets outside mainland China, with an average price reduction of 23%.
The announcement comes amid surging demand in a global AI market that will grow 37.3% annually between 2023 and 2030, according to Grand View Research.
“Cloud infrastructure is poised to be the key cornerstone for the future of AI, and our commitment lies in making sure that the foundation for AI development remains affordable,” said Selina Yuan, President of the International Business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
As it stands, only 4% of organizations currently have generative AI in mature enterprise-wide production, research by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group shows.
Alibaba Cloud’s latest pricing changes will help bring companies up to speed.
Both existing and new customers who place orders through the platform’s official website can enjoy discounts of up to 59% on computing, storage, network, database and big data products.
Users of its popular database products can enjoy price cuts of up to 50% for its long-term packages, while big data products will offer cuts on one to three-year subscription plans by as much as 50%.
International customers using Alibaba Cloud’s cloud data transfer service can enjoy a 10-fold increase in free monthly usage under the pricing updates, with a transfer capacity of 200 GB, up from 20 GB.
AI for All
During the virtual summit, Alibaba Cloud also rolled out a series of features to lower AI adoption barriers for international customers.
The platform launched a service to help companies customize and scale generative AI models, ranging from consolidating multiple models to optimizing underlying infrastructure resources.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud’s AI-driven sustainability platform Energy Expert rolled out an open API service during the summit to enable developers to build customized sustainability applications.
Powered by AI foundational and domain-specific models, the open API provides developers access to energy optimization and carbon emission optimization capabilities.
Its AI computing platform for high-performance computing tasks, PAI-Lingjun Intelligent Computing Service, is also available in Singapore for the first time.
Companies can tap the AI computing platform for accelerating large-scale training and reducing the time and resources required for LLM model training, part of Alibaba Cloud’s mission to become the most open cloud in the era of AI.
