On March 18, Alibaba Cloud announced a price adjustment, citing surging global AI demand and rising upstream supply chain costs. Effective April 18, 2026, the company will increase prices for AI compute services and CPFS (AI Computing) across all regions, with hikes ranging from 5% to 34%.

The Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E, Alibaba's in-house AI chip, sees the steepest increase. This high-end processor features 96GB HBM2e memory and 700GB/s interconnect bandwidth, targeting AI training, inference, and autonomous driving. Reports indicate the Zhenwu 810E outperforms the NVIDIA A800 and rivals the H20, with upgraded versions surpassing the A100. With over hundreds of thousands of units shipped by end of January, demand currently outstrips supply.

The CPFS (AI Computing) service, a high-performance parallel file storage optimized for large-scale AI training, will see a 30% price increase.

ICgoodFind : This price hike underscores the intense demand and rising hardware costs in the AI compute market. The tight supply-demand balance for domestic AI chips highlights the sector's robust growth trajectory.