Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Chinese heavyweight Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, announced on Thursday a price reduction of up to 55 percent on more than 100 core cloud products, marking the biggest price cut in the company's history.

This move aims to make public cloud services more inclusive and accessible in the era of artificial intelligence, and speed up the popularization of cloud computing in all walks of life, the company said.

The new prices, with an average of 20 percent reduction, are effective on Thursday, covering over 100 cloud products, such as computing, storage and database. 

"As the biggest cloud service provider in China and the Asia-Pacific region, we see tremendous growth prospects in China's digital market. That's why we decided to launch the price reduction campaign to lower the threshold of cloud services for more enterprises and developers to reap the technological dividends and accelerate the adoption of advanced public cloud services across various industries in China," said Liu Weiguang, president of public cloud business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. 

Liu said with the rapidly increasing amount of data in China, businesses will need robust, high-performance and cost-effective computing power to help handle and analyze their massive amounts of data, adding Alibaba Cloud aims to become the most open cloud and help customers to turn AI into productivity.

Cloud infrastructure services expenditure on the Chinese mainland grew 18 percent year-on-year to $9.2 billion in the third quarter of 2023, according to market consultancy Canalys. Alibaba Cloud led the cloud infrastructure services market, taking up 39 percent of total spending. 

fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn