What happened in China On March 18, 2026, Alibaba Cloud posted a notice on its website announcing price increases across its AI computing and storage portfolio of up to 34%. The T-Head Zhenwu 810E AI accelerator cards — the workhorses of Alibaba's AI inference stack — rose in price by between 5% and 34% depending on configuration. The company's CPFS file storage product, in its AI computing edition, increased by about 30%. The stated rationale was surging global demand for AI infrastructure and higher supply chain costs. Crucially, Alibaba Cloud also disclosed that it is reallocating limited AI computing resources toward token-based services — a signal that the company's strategic priority is now its Model-as-a-Service layer, not selling raw compute capacity to cost-sensitive external workloads. That reallocation matters as much as the price numbers themselves. Alibaba Cloud Bailian, the company's MaaS platform, recorded its fastest growth on record in…