Alibaba Joins Other Tech Giants in Raising AI Prices

That’s according to a report Wednesday (March 18) from Bloomberg News, which says this places the Chinese tech giant among several of its contemporaries hoping to make the most of heavy demand following major tech investments.

The price increases include a 5% to 34% hike on the company’s T-Head artificial intelligence (AI) computing chips and a 30% uptick in price for Alibaba’s Cloud Parallel File Storage service.

The company this week announced it had created a new business group dedicated to AI, led by CEO Eddie Wu and known as the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) Business Group.

The unit combines several divisions within the company, with the goal of capitalizing on the opportunity presented by AI agents powered by tokens. Wu argued in a letter shared in the announcement that these are due to take on a growing share of digital work. ATH takes its name from the tokens generated by AI models, Wu added.

“ATH is built around a single organizing mission: create tokens, deliver tokens and apply tokens,” he said.

Also this week, Alibaba debuted an AI tool for its enterprise customers. The company’s Wukong offering is available as a standalone desktop application or as part of the latest iteration of DingTalk, Alibaba’s AI-powered workplace platform.

According to the firm’s announcement, Wukong can “coordinate multiple agents to handle complex tasks within a single interface.”

Other companies raising their pricing for AI-related service include Tencent, which recently announced a more than fourfold increase for its Hunyuan foundation models on its agent developer platform.

Another Chinese firm, Baidu, plans to increase the price of its artificial intelligence cloud products by as much as 30% from next month, a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

As the Bloomberg report points out, these price increases are a response to increasing concerns that steep AI investments have not produced sufficient returns.

In other artificial intelligence news, PYMNTS wrote last week about a string of recent funding announcements that show how the market is moving toward infrastructure that helps businesses run AI across everyday workflows. The companies raising capital are developing everything “from agent infrastructure and compute platforms to governance software and industry-specific operating systems designed for actual work environments,” that report said.

“At the center is the recognition that deploying AI in enterprises is significantly harder,” PYMNTS added. “Companies need orchestration layers for AI agents, governance systems to monitor model behavior, compute infrastructure for large-scale inference and vertical software that embeds AI across industries. Investors are now backing startups that deliver these operational essentials.”