(Yicai) March 19 -- Baidu AI Cloud said it will increase the prices of artificial intelligence computing products and services by 5 percent to 30 percent starting next month to ensure the long-term stability of the platform and the quality of services.

The new prices will take effect on April 18, Baidu AI Cloud announced yesterday. Parallel file storage prices will also be hiked by around 30 percent, it added.

On the same day, Alibaba Cloud said it will raise AI computing and storage products prices by as much as 34 percent on April 18 due to booming global demand and higher supply chain costs. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Tencent Cloud have also announced price increases since the start of this year.

The main reason for cloud providers raising prices is the accelerated adoption of Agentic AI, driven by recent enhancements in model capabilities and the OpenClaw phenomenon, among other factors, Charlie Dai, vice president and chief analyst at research firm Forrester, told Yicai. This has led to a rapid surge in demand for large language model training and inference, he added.

In addition, there are pressures on high-end chips, high bandwidth memory, energy consumption, and delivery resources, which are also contributing to the situation, Dai pointed out.

The price of Alibaba's Zhenwu 810E AI chip will jump 5 percent to 34 percent, while that of the intelligent computing version of its file storage CPFS will surge 30 percent, according to the company.

Although Volcano Engine, the cloud service provider of TikTok owner ByteDance, has not yet disclosed any price increases, it has made phased adjustments to some promotions related to its coding plan to optimize resource allocation and ensure subscribers' good experience, including canceling first-time purchase discounts.

The direct cause of the price adjustments is the token consumption triggered by OpenClaw, which has ranked as the most popular application on OpenRouter for several straight days, with its token consumption far exceeding that of the second app on the rankings, according to a research report by China Galaxy Securities.

OpenRouter processed 14.8 trillion tokens during the first week of this month, doubling compared to the first week of the year. Among these, the token output from workflows driven by agents accounted for more than half of the platform's total output, marking a shift in the value of the AI industry from model to task completion capabilities, causing a structural impact on computing infrastructure and driving inference demands to expand towards "central-edge" computing collaboration.

Editor: Martin Kadiev