Token calls surge; Alibaba Cloud announces up to 34% price increase for AI computing power and storage products

Alibaba Cloud AI (Artificial Intelligence) computing power, storage, and other products see up to a 34% price increase.

On March 18, Alibaba Cloud announced on its official website: starting April 18, 2026, Beijing time, due to a surge in global AI demand and supply chain price increases, Alibaba Cloud’s AI computing power, storage, and other products will see a maximum price hike of 34%. This round of price increases includes: a 5%-34% rise for computing cards such as the Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E; a 30% increase for the file storage product CPFS (Intelligent Computing Edition).

The announcement states that customers who have purchased related services before April 18, 2026, will not be affected by this adjustment within their current order/billing cycle. The new prices will apply at the start of the next renewal cycle.

Source: Alibaba Cloud Announcement

According to informed sources, another major reason for this price hike is the “explosive growth in Token usage.” During the Spring Festival, AI Agent applications surged, and Alibaba Cloud’s MaaS business Balian achieved its highest growth rate from January to March this year. Alibaba Cloud is shifting its scarce AI computing resources toward Token services. This indicates that Alibaba Cloud is adjusting its business strategy from selling computing resources to selling intelligence, relying on its self-developed Qianwen large model.

Just two days ago, Alibaba announced the establishment of a new Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group, including Tongyi Laboratory, MaaS business line, Qianwen Division, Wukong Division, and AI Innovation Division, covering the full range from foundational model development and model service platforms to AI applications for individuals and enterprises. Meanwhile, Alibaba will create a unified model service platform, Balian, which will be offered externally by Alibaba Cloud as a commercial MaaS service.

Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang stated in an internal letter: “We are on the eve of an AGI explosion. A vast number of digital tasks will be supported by hundreds of billions of AI Agents, which will run on tokens generated by models, becoming the main medium for human interaction with the digital world.”

It is also reported that major overseas cloud providers have raised their core cloud product prices this year. On January 22, AWS announced a 15% price increase for EC2 instances used for large model training. On January 27, Google Cloud announced price hikes for data transfer services, AI, and computing infrastructure, with increases of up to 100%.

On March 17, Alibaba announced the launch of Wukong, the world’s first enterprise-level AI-native work platform. Wukong is an independent application that is now open for early access and will be directly integrated into DingTalk, used by over 20 million enterprises. According to reports, Alibaba’s B2B capabilities will gradually be embedded into the platform in the form of skills, serving as Alibaba AI’s unified output for enterprise work scenarios.

Reporter: Hu Hanyan, The Paper

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