(Yicai) Oct. 14 — Alibaba Cloud is lowering the prices of some of its Elastic Compute Service offerings, which are high-performance, stable, reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure, by as much as 10.2 percent in major international markets as the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding ramps up its overseas expansion efforts.
The price cuts will take effect from Oct. 30 in Frankfurt, Tokyo and Dubai, Alibaba Cloud said on its website.
Although this price drop only affects a limited range of products, it reveals Alibaba Cloud’s determination to expand abroad, an industry insider told Yicai. It is normal for ECS products to have country-specific pricing, he added. Behind the different pricing strategies, Alibaba Cloud may be shifting toward a more targeted, refined approach for each market.
Frankfurt, for example, is a key gateway for Alibaba Cloud’s push into Europe and it is also the region with the biggest price cuts this time round. Alibaba Cloud chose to set up its first European cloud center in Frankfurt in 2016 and in 2022 it opened its third data center in Germany, also in Frankfurt.
Alibaba Cloud currently ranks fourth globally in the cloud computing market, behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google Cloud, according to data from US market research firm Gartner. While it has already secured the top spot in the Asia-Pacific market, expanding its footprint in other markets amid the AI boom remains a key challenge for its overseas expansion.
Asia is one of Alibaba Cloud’s most important markets at the moment, Yuan Qian, who was president of the Hangzhou-based firm’s International Business Unit in July, told Yicai at the time. At the same time, the fast-growing digital, cloud computing and AI markets in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe present new opportunities for the company.
Alibaba Cloud announced a new global infrastructure expansion plan at its Aspara Conference last month. The firm said it will set up cloud computing regions in Brazil, France and the Netherlands for the first time, and increase the size of its data centers in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai. This shows that Alibaba Cloud is ramping up its presence in the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
“In the future, there may only be five to six super cloud computing platforms in the world,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said at the conference. The new AI computing era requires denser computing power, faster networks and larger clusters, he said.
Alibaba Cloud may already be positioning itself for more intense competition among the world’s leading cloud providers.
Editor: Kim Taylor
