Alibaba slashes Cloud prices by 50% to drive adoption before IPO

E-commerce and tech giant Alibaba’s cloud computing division will cut prices for its products and services by up to 50 per cent starting Wednesday, stepping up efforts to fight for a bigger slice of China’s cloud market amid rising competition.

According to Alibaba Cloud’s website, prices for elastic computing services — the ability to quickly expand or decrease processing — using Arm and Intel-based chips will drop by 15 to 20 per cent, while services using Nvidia’s V100 and T4 graphics processing units will drop between 41 to 47 per cent.
 

The price cuts are one way for the company to attract more customers, said Zhang Yi, who tracks China’s cloud computing sector at research firm Canalys, though their actual impact will depend on the specific services clients buy. Alibaba Cloud was one of China’s earliest domestic entrants into cloud computing, and currently supplies more than one-third of the sector in China.

Sweet Deals

41-47% price drop in services using Nvidia’s V100 and T4 graphics processing units

15-20% price drop in services using Arm and Intel-based chips