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Alibaba Group Holdings cloud computing unit has cut prices by up to 55 per cent on more than 100 core products the largest discount offering in the companys history to attract more enterprises and software developers as users in mainland China, as the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) picks up steam across various industries. This new campaign, which offers an average 20 per cent reduction in prices, took effect on Thursday and includes the units elastic compute service (ECS), object storage service (OSS) and database product categories, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement. Hangzhou-based parent Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The initiative seeks to lower the threshold of cloud services for more enterprises and developers, according to Liu Weiguang, the president of public cloud business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

With the rapidly increasing amount of data in China, businesses will need robust, high-performance and cost-effective computing power to help handle and analyse the data before turning them into actionable intelligence, Liu said. This is where we can help, as we aim to become the most open cloud [platform] and help our customers to turn AI into productivity.

Prices of Alibaba Clouds ECS, which provides users with virtual cloud servers, has been cut up to 36 per cent, while those for OSS a service to store and access any amount of data from anywhere was slashed up to 55 per cent. For database product categories, prices were reduced up to 40 per cent. Both existing and new customers can avail of the discounted prices, according to Alibaba Cloud.

Alibabas cloud unit now serves 80% of Chinese tech companies

Lowering prices, however, could also trigger a price war among Chinas major cloud services providers, as competition intensifies among vendors to support the development and deployment of innovative AI services in the country.

Alibaba seeks growth from AI co-development programme, cloud price cuts

At present, Alibaba Cloud operates 89 availability zones where it operates data centres in 30 regions globally, supporting more than 4 million customers worldwide.

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Alibabas cloud computing unit slashes prices by up to 55% on 100 core products - South China Morning Post