Alibaba this year spurred a cascade of price reductions in cloud computing, after it offered discounts as much as 55% on more than 100 domestic services in March. That was followed that same day by rounds of discounts from rival JD.com Inc. — AP
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd slashed prices for a clutch of artificial intelligence services by as much as 97%, spurring an immediate response from Baidu Inc in potentially the start of a price war in China’s nascent AI market.
Baidu Cloud said it would offer free services based on its Ernie AI models on Tuesday, hours after Alibaba offered deals on nine products built atop its own Tongyi Qianwen. ByteDance Ltd last week announced pricing for AI services that it said were 99% lower than Chinese industry norms, using Ernie and Alibaba’s Qwen as benchmarks.
