Alibaba Cloud is cutting prices as it looks to boost the non-Chinese market
Alibaba Cloud has announced significant price reductions for its compute, storage and database services, with a clear focus on lowering costs for its international customers.
The unexpected move follows similar offers for Chinese customers unveiled in January, which saw price drops for users who signed long-term deals.
The Hangzhou, China-based company announced the changes on April 8 revealed steep price cuts of up to 59% on major public cloud products that use the company’s international data centers outside mainland China.
Alibaba Cloud lowers prices for international customers
While details surrounding the discounts were not disclosed by Alibaba, a notable reduction was seen in the Object Storage Service (OSS) resource plan, with a one-year 500GB package dropping from $63 to $16.99.
Other discounts mentioned in the announcement list terms of one to three years, suggesting longer commitments are more likely to deliver cost savings.
The announcement coincides with a number of other AI products, including a service for managing the integration and operation of large language models, which the company says βlowers the barrier to deploying AI.β
Alibaba also announced that it would extend its free monthly use of Cloud Data Transfer Service to international customers, increasing the limit from 20 GB to 200 GB. Please note that these do not include the outbound costs associated with migrating data from Alibaba Cloud; companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have already lifted their borders amid EU debates over anti-competitive business practices.
With a clear intention to capture a larger share of the international market β which largely consists of the three tech giants mentioned above β Alibaba’s latest revelation was that it would introduce financial incentives to “strengthen its international partnership network”, including a increase in standard reseller rebate and commission rates and elimination of initial tier requirements and annual obligations for resellers.