According to a report by China Daily on March 19…
China’s leading cloud providers are hiking prices for AI-related services as soaring demand for artificial intelligence strains infrastructure and supply chains. Alibaba Cloud announced price increases of up to 34 percent for its AI computing and storage products, including T-Head Zhenwu 810E computing cards and CPFS intelligent storage, citing global AI demand growth and rising costs.
Baidu Cloud also adjusted pricing across AI computing and storage services, reflecting escalating hardware and network costs. The moves mirror a global trend, with major providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Tencent Cloud raising fees for bandwidth and compute capacity.
The surge in pricing is driven largely by an explosion in “token” usage—the units AI models consume to process and generate data. Applications such as deep research, AI agents, and code generation require significantly more tokens per task, offsetting efficiency gains. Autonomous AI agents, exemplified by platforms like OpenClaw, have accelerated this trend, with token consumption on OpenRouter’s API aggregation platform tripling from 80.6 billion to 358 billion in just one month.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted that AI agents often require repeated calls across multiple models and tools to complete a single task, causing “orders-of-magnitude increases” in token usage. Analysts warn that rapid adoption of agent-style AI applications will further push demand for inference computing power, bandwidth, and infrastructure investment.
Sun Zhenya, senior research manager at IDC China, emphasized that enterprises need to plan strategically for computing resources and AI model usage as token consumption grows exponentially. The ongoing price adjustments signal a new phase in the AI cloud market, highlighting the pressures on providers to balance capacity, cost, and service quality in an era of rapidly expanding AI workloads.