Cloud providers Huawei and AWS implement AI service price increases

Major cloud service providers are implementing price increases for AI-related services and machine learning capacity.

Huawei Cloud has announced that its AI-enabled service prices in China will be adjusted effective November 16, 2026. This follows previous adjustments in August 2026, where the company introduced time-of-day differentiated billing for various model services. This shift aligns with a broader trend in the cloud industry; since March 2026, major providers including Google Cloud, Amazon, Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Baidu have raised prices for AI computing and storage by approximately 30% to 50%.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has also implemented price revisions for its EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML. Effective October 7, 2026, AWS updated reservation prices for several GPU-based instances. While US-based regions saw increases of approximately 15%, regions outside the US, such as Tokyo, experienced higher increases of roughly 26.5% as the company moved toward unified pricing across all global regions.

The primary driver for these industry-wide price hikes is the massive surge in demand for AI inference. In China, daily token usage grew from 100 billion at the start of 2024 to over 140 trillion by March 2026, significantly altering the supply and demand dynamics for computing power.