Author：Wall Street CN

2026In 2016, the cloud computing industry wrote a historic chapter that overturned nearly 20 years of conventions. The long-standing pricing rule of "only decreasing and never increasing" was completely broken, and global cloud vendors launched a massive wave of price increases.

From overseas tech giants breaking the deadlock to leading domestic manufacturers following suit, the prices of core products such as AI computing power and high-end storage have increased significantly. A computing power pricing revolution driven by artificial intelligence is completely reshaping the underlying logic and business landscape of the cloud computing industry.

This price increase is not a random market fluctuation, but an inevitable result of the triple transformation of computing power supply and demand, industry costs, and business models in the AI era.

As computing power transforms from a universally accessible basic resource into a scarce strategic commodity, as hardware costs skyrocket across the board, squeezing industry profits, and as cloud vendors shift from "selling resources" to "selling intelligence," the two-decade-long price reduction cycle has officially come to an end, and the cloud computing industry has entered a new stage of development.

Global cloud providers raise prices in unison, ending a 20-year tradition of price reductions.

The development of the cloud computing industry over the past two decades has always revolved around reducing costs through economies of scale and gaining market share through low prices; price reduction has been the constant theme of the industry.

However, in 2026, this ironclad rule was completely broken, and global cloud vendors reached an unprecedented consensus on price increases, with both overseas and domestic markets sounding the call for price adjustments.

The overseas market was the first to initiate the transformation. In January of this year, AWS broke with the nearly 20-year industry tradition of "only lowering prices and never raising them" by raising the price of EC2 instances dedicated to large model training by 15%, becoming the first global cloud service giant to publicly raise prices.

Following suit, Google Cloud raised prices for its AI infrastructure, with increases reaching as high as 100%, directly targeting the core AI computing power and storage sector.

The price increases by domestic cloud vendors are more concentrated, forming a coordinated effort among the three giants. Tencent Cloud took the lead, announcing on March 13 that it would adjust the prices of its Hunyuan series models, with some core products seeing increases of up to 400%, firing the first shot in the price hikes by domestic cloud vendors.

On March 18, Alibaba Cloud issued a price adjustment announcement, with computing power card products such as Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E increasing by 5% to 34%, and file storage CPFS (Intelligent Computing Edition) increasing by 30%. The new prices will officially take effect on April 18.

Just hours later, Baidu AI Cloud followed suit, announcing that it would adjust the prices of its AI computing power and storage products starting April 18, with AI computing power increasing by 5% to 30% and parallel file storage also increasing by 30%.

The reasons given by domestic and foreign cloud providers for raising prices are highly consistent: the explosive growth of global artificial intelligence applications, the continuous rise in computing power demand, the significant increase in the cost of core hardware and infrastructure, and the unsustainable low-price competition model in the industry.

The collective action of the world's leading cloud providers, from AWS and Google Cloud to Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, signifies a fundamental shift in the pricing logic of the cloud computing market.

It is worth noting that this round of price increases is not a comprehensive price hike, but rather a precise focus on core product lines such as AI computing power and high-end storage, while the prices of basic products such as traditional cloud servers remain unchanged.

This detail clearly reflects that the core driving force behind the industry's price increases comes from the restructuring of demand in the AI era, rather than simply the transfer of costs.

The explosion of AI agents: Computing power transforms from a universally accessible resource into a strategic asset.

The pricing of cloud computing is fundamentally determined by supply and demand. Over the past decade, the core demand for cloud computing has come from enterprise digital transformation, focusing on standardized scenarios such as server replacement and data storage. Cloud vendors have relied on economies of scale to reduce costs, resulting in a competitive environment of "low-price market grabbing."

However, the arrival of the AI era has led to a qualitative leap in the demand for computing power, directly triggering a supply-demand gap.

The immediate trigger for this round of price increases was the widespread adoption of AI intelligent agents.

The rapid popularization of OpenClaw-type intelligent agents reflects the market demand for autonomous intelligent agents. However, their implementation in real industrial environments faces significant challenges: due to a lack of deep understanding of industry rules and business processes, intelligent agents often repeatedly call tools when performing complex tasks, resulting in token consumption far exceeding effective output.

Especially in some high-frequency call scenarios, the cost of OpenClaw's token consumption can be tens or even hundreds of times that of the cost of integrated agents. This high-investment, low-output model poses a sustainability challenge in its large-scale industrial application.

Behind this is the exponential growth in computing power consumption, with tokens becoming the core variable for measuring computing power demand.

In the AI big model system, the token is the smallest unit of computation in natural language processing. Every question asked by the user and every generation by the AI involves the flow and consumption of tokens.

Data shows that the token consumption of intelligent agents like OpenClaw in a single task is tens or even hundreds of times that of traditional dialogue AI, directly breaking the long-term growth ceiling of computing power demand.

IDC's forecast data more intuitively illustrates this explosive trend: by 2030, the number of active AI agents worldwide will reach 2.216 billion, and the annual token consumption will soar from 0.0005 Peta Tokens in 2025 to 152,000 Peta Tokens, an increase of more than 300 million times.

Domestic market demand is also growing rapidly. Alibaba Cloud's MaaS business, Bailian, achieved a record high growth rate in the first quarter of 2026, while Tencent's Hunyuan model saw a fourfold increase in monthly usage, leading to an immediate and severe shortage of computing resources.

The explosive growth in demand has created a sharp contradiction with the rigid constraints on computing power supply. Large-scale model training and inference are highly dependent on high-end GPU chips, and although the domestic substitution of chips continues to advance, the overall production capacity is still unable to meet the explosive demand.

Global chip suppliers' production capacity has already been booked in advance, prioritizing customers with large and stable orders, while cloud vendors face restrictions on external computing power procurement.

At the same time, global tech giants are ramping up their computing power reserves, further exacerbating the supply shortage.

ByteDance has stockpiled 480,000 H20 GPUs alone. Companies like Tencent and Alibaba prioritize using their own computing power for their own large-scale model development, leaving very limited computing resources available for external leasing. Overseas, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are also continuously increasing their investment in computing power, intensifying the global competition for computing power.

Under dual pressure,AI computing power has completely transformed from a "universally accessible resource" into a scarce strategic resource, and the cloud computing market has shifted from a buyer's market to a seller's market.

Alibaba Cloud and other vendors have explicitly stated that they will "shift the focus of scarce AI computing power toward token business," abandoning the sale of general computing power at low prices and instead focusing on high-value AI computing power scenarios. This resource strategy is directly reflected in price adjustments and has become the core demand logic for this round of price increases.

From "selling computing power" to "selling intelligence," the token ecosystem becomes the core tool.

This round of price increases is not only a passive adjustment of costs and supply and demand, but also a signal of proactive strategic transformation for cloud vendors. The industry is completely bidding farewell to the old model of "scale first, low-price competition" and shifting from "selling computing power resources" to "selling intelligent services," reconstructing the business ecosystem with tokens at its core.

Alibaba Cloud's move is the most representative. Two days before announcing the price increase, Alibaba established the Alibaba Token Hub (ATH) business group, integrating core AI businesses such as Tongyi Lab and Qianwen Business Unit, and is directly led by CEO Wu Yongming.

The organizational restructuring and pricing adjustments form a strategic alignment, signifying that Alibaba Cloud is officially abandoning its profit model of simply selling computing power and is fully upgrading to the higher-level track of "selling intelligence".

Jensen Huang's statement at the 2026 GTC conference revealed a new logic in the industry: "Tokens are hard currency, and computing power is a company's revenue."

His proposed tiered pricing blueprint for tokens, ranging from a free tier to an ultra-high-speed tier, with prices ranging from $0 to $150 per million tokens, positions tokens as a basic commodity like electricity and tap water. This model has been widely adopted by cloud vendors worldwide.

Tokens are not only a unit of measurement for computing power consumption, but also a core tool for cloud vendors to restructure their business models.

Alibaba Cloud is allocating computing resources to the Token business, which is essentially to build a business ecosystem centered on Tokens. The more Tokens a customer consumes, the more dependent they become on the cloud provider's AI services.

By implementing tiered pricing, ordinary users can enjoy free or low-cost token services, while high-end customers can pay a premium for high-speed, high-concurrency services, thereby maximizing value.

Tencent Cloud's significant price adjustment for the Hunyuan model is also based on the revaluation of the token's value, directly improving the profitability of AI services by increasing the unit price of the token.

Cloud vendors are no longer preoccupied with low-price competition in general-purpose computing power, but are instead focusing on high-value token businesses and intelligent services. Price increases have become a "manifesto" for the industry's transformation towards high-value tracks.

Zhang Peng, General Manager of Ant Financial's Big Model Technology Innovation Department, said that technological development will eventually return to the industry's rational requirements for efficiency. In the next stage of competition, token efficiency will become the core indicator for measuring the value of enterprise-level AI.

"In the second half of the large-scale model industry's implementation, the core issue is not the competition of model parameter scale, but the continuous improvement of unit token efficiency." Zhang Peng believes that enterprises should combine large and small models with actual scenarios and needs to achieve higher business value with lower computing power costs.

This transformation signifies a complete shift in the core competitiveness of the cloud computing industry. In the past, competition focused on scale, price, and server quantity; in the future, it will be about model capabilities, token ecosystems, and intelligent service efficiency, ushering in a new dimension of competition.

Price increases are not the end, but the starting point for the reconstruction of the AI computing power ecosystem.

The collective price increase by global cloud providers is not a simple price adjustment, but the starting point for the restructuring of the entire AI industry chain. In the short term, it will accelerate industry reshuffling, and in the long term, it will drive the industry toward a balanced supply and demand and a healthy and sustainable development path.

In the short term, price increases will accelerate the weeding out of weaker players in the industry. Small and medium-sized enterprises lacking capital and computing power reserves will exit the market due to cost pressures. Computing power, technology, and financial resources will further concentrate on leading cloud vendors, leading to a continuous increase in industry concentration and a more stable market structure.

In the long run, price increases will force the entire industry chain to break through the current predicament. Upstream chip manufacturers will accelerate capacity release and technological breakthroughs to promote the process of domestic substitution; midstream cloud service providers will optimize computing power scheduling efficiency and reduce hardware dependence; downstream developers will optimize model calling logic and reduce unnecessary token consumption, forming a virtuous cycle of collaborative cost reduction and technological upgrading across the entire industry chain.

For cloud vendors, raising prices is only the first step in strategic transformation. The core of long-term competition still lies in three capabilities: first, computing efficiency, improving hardware utilization through technological optimization; second, service experience, providing customers with one-stop AI intelligent services; and third, the token ecosystem, building a complete tiered service system to bind high-value customers.

The cloud computing price surge in 2026 marked the first profound transformation brought to the industry by the AI era. It ended nearly two decades of price reductions, broke the industry's predicament of low-price competition, and ushered in a new era where "computing power is power and intelligence is value."

When tokens become the hard currency of the industry, and when computing power becomes a strategic resource, the cloud computing industry will break free from the low-level trap of resource-based competition and embark on a new journey of high-quality development driven by technology and value.

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