Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced its new pricing strategy for international customers with price reductions of up to 59% on core public cloud products using the company’s international data centers out of the Chinese mainland. This is aligned with the global cloud leader’s latest AI-first strategy aiming to make core computing resources more accessible for customers of all sizes and empower their long-term growth in the AI era.
Effective immediately, the new pricing strategy covers five core public cloud product categories, including compute, storage, network, database, as well as big data products, with an average of 23% price reduction.
“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. As a cloud service provider committed to facilitating customers’ long-term growth, Alibaba Cloud is dedicated to making AI more accessible in terms of cost efficiency, availability of proven technologies, and more. Our latest pricing strategy is designed not only to reward long-term subscribers with more substantial discounts, but also to ensure that businesses can have a stable foundation to develop their long-term strategies when planning and developing their own AI applications,” said Selina Yuan, President of the International Business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
The new pricing is applicable to both existing and new customers who place orders through the official Alibaba Cloud website. Here are some of the highlights announced at the Alibaba Cloud Spring Launch today:
- Reductions will apply to a variety of payment models of Elastic Compute Service (ECS), including pay-as-you-go, subscriptions, and savings plans, encompassing the majority of ECS instance types and generations. For instance, international businesses that prefer a pay-as-you-go billing model can reduce costs by up to 30% and 59% of ECS and Elastic Block Storage(EBS) respectively.
- To maintain a stable cost-efficiency throughout the next 12 months, the new Object Storage Service (OSS)-Resource plan enables customers to reserve storage capacity in a specific region for one year to obtain deeper discounts. The price of a one-year package of 500 GB storage plan, which is popular among SMEs, has been cut to USD16.99 from USD 63.
- Users of database products, including ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL, ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL, ApsaraDB RDS for MariaDB, ApsaraDB for Redis, and ApsaraDB for MongoDB, will also enjoy price reductions in long-term packages, spanning from one-to-five years, by up to 50%. Similarly, big data products, including MaxCompute, Hologres, DataWorks, Realtime Compute for Apache Flink, and Open Search, will offer cuts on one-to-three-year subscription plans by as much as 50%.
- Lastly, Alibaba Cloud also increases the FREE monthly usage of Cloud Data Transfer Service from 20GB to 200GB for its international customers. Cloud Data Transfer Service is a network product providing complete control over the volume and cost of data transfers incurred across services as well as generating bills.
New services and product features to boost generative AI development
To reduce AI process complexity for customers worldwide, Alibaba Cloud also announced the availability of a series of innovative product features and services for international customers during the event.
- To lower the threshold of leveraging AI, Alibaba Cloud introduced a managed large language models (LLMs) service to offer access to specialized experts dedicated to streamlining the integration and operation of LLMs across both the model architecture and cloud infrastructure. This enables businesses to concentrate on leveraging the business value of LLMs without the complexities of technical implementation.
- PAI-Lingjun Intelligent Computing Service, a comprehensive AI computing platform for high-performance computing tasks, such as foundation model training and inference, is now available in Singapore. The service provides full-process AI engineering capabilities, including AI development, AI training, and computing resource management.
- Energy Expert, Alibaba Cloud’s AI-driven sustainability solution, has enhanced its functionalities with the introduction of an open API service. This solution now offers carbon micro-services and energy micro-services, fully developed using LLM capabilities and domain-specific knowledge. These services provide functionalities such as carbon footprint calculation, carbon emission optimization, energy consumption monitoring, forecasting, and optimization. The microservices enable developers to create customized sustainability applications and, at the same time, improve the underlying generative AI models with their knowledge bases for better outcomes.
New initiatives to strengthen global partnership ecosystem
In a move to bolster its international partnership network, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled a suite of financial incentives during the event. These include an increase in the standard discount and commission rates for resellers, the removal of initial tier requirements and yearly commitments for resellers, and an enhancement of support for channel partners’ efforts to grow their market presence.
Additionally, Alibaba Cloud further standardized its training empowerment program to boost partners’ service delivery competencies and introduced a specialized partner service manager role to provide dedicated support.
Currently, Alibaba Cloud operates 89 availability zones in 30 regions globally, supporting over 4 million customers worldwide. In the latest “Gartner® report Market Share: IT Services, Worldwide, 2022” released in 2023, Alibaba is the world’s third leading and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider.
