File photo/NBD

On April 26, National Business Daily learned from Alibaba Cloud that the company has announced its largest price reduction in history, with core product prices reduced by 15% to 50% and storage product prices by up to 50%.

As China's largest and the world's third largest cloud computing provider, Alibaba Cloud's price reduction will further expand the user base and scale of public cloud, and increase the market penetration rate of cloud computing.

Alibaba Cloud stated that among the products affected, the 7th-Gen ECS instances and Yitian instances see a price reduction of 20%, the storage OSS deep cold archive sees a price cut of up to 50%. Prices of the network load balancing SLB and NAT gateway drop by 15%, the database RDS Yitian version by 40%, the video cloud and CDN by 20%, and the firewall for security Web applications by 30%. The price adjustment will take effect on May 7, and users can obtain new preferential prices through the Alibaba Cloud official website.

Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO Zhang Yong said that through the large-scale price reduction, the company aims to give back more technology dividends to customers and partners, continuously reduce the cost of using the cloud, and expand the market space of the cloud.

At the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Partners Conference, Zhang Yong also revealed that 200,000 enterprise users have applied for an access to the Alibaba version of ChatGPT, Tongyi Qianwen, which was launched on April 7 and has functions such as multi-round dialogue, copywriting creation, logical reasoning, multi-modal understanding, and multi-language support.

At the same time, he announced that the Tongyi Qianwen Partner Program has officially launched, covering multiple industries such as finance, general, transportation, communication, energy, and electricity.

At the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit in Beijing on April 11, Zhang Yong announced that all products under Alibaba in the future will be connected to Tongyi Qianwen. At that time, Alibaba Cloud also stated that it will open Tongyi Qianwen to the public to help companies create exclusive large models.

Alibaba Cloud did not disclose the timeline for product upgrades. The company stated that DingTalk and Tmall Genie have first connected to Tongyi Qianwen for testing and will officially release new features after evaluation and certification.

In February, Alibaba Group announced its results for Q3 of FY2023 (Q4 of 2022 in calendar year). Alibaba Cloud's revenue increased to RMB 26.693 billion and RMB 20.179 billion before and after offsetting inter-segment transactions, respectively, representing year-on-year growth of 1% and 3%. The adjusted EBITA was RMB 356 million, showing a year-on-year increase of 165%. In 2022, Alibaba Cloud added six new data centers in overseas markets, located in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Thailand, South Korea, and Japan, respectively.