Alibaba Cloud raises prices for domain name auctions amid AI compute price war

  • Auctions for previously owned domain names now start at 99 yuan, a 43 per cent increase over new prices announced just a year ago

Ann Caoin Shanghai
Alibaba Cloud’s booth at Hong Kong FinTech Week on November 2, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg
Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit – the service handling the online broadcasting of the 2024 Summer Olympics – has announced that it raised prices on its domain name auction platform, as the company tries to deal with rising costs while grappling with price competition for artificial intelligence (AI) services.

Starting from August 1, starting bids for domain names on Alibaba Cloud will be raised to 199 yuan for “.com” addresses and 99 yuan for other top level domains, the company said in a statement published on its official website on Saturday. Hangzhou-based Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

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