China's leading cloud service providers, including Alibaba Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud, have announced price increases for computing resources, signaling a potential turning point in an industry long defined by aggressive discounting.

Photo via China Daily

Alibaba Cloud said on its official website that prices for several computing cards, including those powered by its in-house Zhenwu 810E chips, will rise by between 5 percent and 34 percent. Fees for its CPFS parallel file storage system, designed for AI workloads, will increase by about 30 percent.

Shortly after, Baidu AI Cloud issued a similar notice, saying it would raise prices for AI-related computing products by roughly 5 percent to 30 percent, while parallel file storage services would also see increases of around 30 percent.

The announcements helped trigger a rally in China's stock market, with shares linked to computing power leasing surging and several hitting their daily upper limits.

For years, China's cloud computing market has been locked in a "price-for-volume" competition, but the latest moves suggest that dynamic may be shifting.

Both companies cited "rising supply chain costs and an explosion in demand for AI computing power" as the primary drivers behind the price hikes, as large-scale model training and deployment place increasing strain on infrastructure capacity.