BroadChain has learned that on March 18, Alibaba Cloud announced price adjustments, increasing rates for certain AI computing power and storage products by up to 34%. The company cited sustained global growth in AI demand and rising supply chain costs as the primary reasons.
Specifically, prices for computing cards powered by chips like Tongyi Lab's Zhenwu 810E rose between 5% and 34%, while the CPFS (Intelligent Computing Edition) file storage service saw a 30% increase.
Industry sources indicate that beyond supply chain pressures, a significant factor behind this price hike is a "surge in token call volume."
With the rapid deployment of large language model (LLM) applications, Alibaba Cloud's MaaS platform "Bailian" reported its highest quarterly business growth rate on record in Q1 2026, placing additional strain on underlying computing resources.
To manage the resource shortage, Alibaba Cloud is prioritizing the allocation of scarce AI computing power toward token-related services to ensure the stability of LLM inference and token calls.