The Big Model Price War is Over: Seven Cloud Providers Have Raised Prices Since the Beginning of the Year, With the Highest Increase Exceeding 400%

According to 1M AI News monitoring, since the beginning of the year, seven domestic and foreign cloud providers have announced price increases, and AI computing power has shifted from "price wars" to "supply and demand pricing":

1. Amazon AWS increased the price of EC2 ML capacity reserve service by about 15% on January 22, breaking the 20-year pricing tradition of "only lowering, not raising," seen as an industry turning point.
2. Zhifupu raised the GLM Coding Plan package by 30% in February, and then increased the GLM-5-Turbo API by 20% on March 16, with a total increase of 83% within the year.
3. UCloud announced a price increase for all cloud products and services on March 1.
4. Tencent Cloud announced on March 11 that GLM 5, MiniMax 2.5, and Kimi 2.5 would end free public testing and transition to commercial charges, with price increases for some Hybrid series models, with some increases exceeding 400%.
5. Alibaba Cloud announced a 5%-34% price increase for AI computing card products such as Pingtouge Zhenwu 810E on March 18, and a 30% increase for file storage CPFS (Intelligent Computing Edition).
6. Baidu Intelligent Cloud announced a 5%-30% price increase for AI computing products and a 30% increase for parallel file storage on March 18.
7. Google Cloud announced a global data transmission service price increase effective May 1, doubling the per-GB rate in North America from $0.04 to $0.08.

The direct catalyst for the price hike wave is the Token consumption triggered by OpenClaw. China Post Securities analysis believes that OpenClaw has upgraded the Token consumption model from "human-machine dialogue" to "machine self-circulation," with a single OpenClaw running 24/7 consuming tens of millions of Tokens per month. OpenRouter data shows that OpenClaw was the highest global Token-consuming application in the past month, with consumption on March 16 being 3.6 times that of the second-place app. Insiders revealed that Alibaba Cloud's Bailian MaaS business achieved its highest historical growth rate in January-March this year, with the company currently tilting scarce AI computing resources toward Token business.

A deeper background is the rising global AI computing power supply chain costs. IDC China Research Manager Cui Tingting stated that the AI demand explosion has led to tight core hardware supply, extended delivery cycles, and hardware suppliers accelerating price increases under supply-demand imbalances. New AI computing data centers have higher requirements for electricity and liquid cooling systems, further driving up costs. Cui Tingting believes that if the supply chain costs continue to rise, cloud providers may once again increase prices.