Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud GPU pricing overview

Alibaba Cloud is a hyperscaler GPU cloud provider headquartered in Hangzhou, China. Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) is Asia's largest cloud provider, offering Elastic GPU Service with L20 (8× NVIDIA L20, 48GB each, from $1,279/month), A10 (4× NVIDIA A10, 24GB each, from $676/month), V100, T4, and P100 instances across China, APAC, US, EU, and Middle East. Model Studio provides enterprise-grade access to Qwen3.8-Flash, Qwen3.7-Plus, Qwen3.8-Max, Wan2.7 (T2V/I2V), DeepSeek V4 Pro, HappyHorse-1.1-T2V, and 20+ models. AI Token Plan from $6/month. AI Savings Plan saves up to 47%. AIACC-Training and AIACC-Inference accelerators optimize GPU utilization. FastGPU for rapid cluster deployment. cGPU for GPU sharing across containers. Billing is On-demand, Reserved, Spot, AI Token Plan with a minimum commitment of None (on-demand). Available regions include CN, APAC, EU, US and 1 more. GPU instances can be provisioned on-demand, making Alibaba Cloud suitable for both short-duration experiments and sustained production workloads.

Alibaba Cloud vs other GPU providers

Alibaba Cloud competes with providers including Lambda Labs, CoreWeave, RunPod, Paperspace, Vast.ai, and the major hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) for GPU compute workloads spanning LLM training, fine-tuning, and inference serving. Key differentiators include: L20 GPU instances (8× L20, 48GB each) — latest available in APAC; Model Studio: Qwen3.8, Wan2.7, DeepSeek V4 Pro, HappyHorse T2V; AI Token Plan from $6/month — wide model access in Asia. Use the side-by-side comparison tool above to see Alibaba Cloud pricing against any other provider across shared GPU models. For a broader market view, the live GPU prices table shows all 4 Alibaba Cloud listings alongside 91+ providers in a single sortable view.

Best use cases for Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud is best suited for: China/APAC workloads, Enterprises in Asia, Teams using Alibaba services, Video generation (Wan2.7, HappyHorse). Support tiers range from Basic → Enterprise, making it viable for both individual researchers and enterprise teams with SLA requirements. There are currently 4 active GPU listings on Alibaba Cloud, covering H100 80GB, A100 80GB, A10G, V100 16GB. H100 SXM5 instances with NVLink interconnect are commonly used for large-scale training workloads. A100 40GB and RTX 4090 instances are frequently used for fine-tuning and inference of smaller models.

Alibaba Cloud billing model and cost structure

Alibaba Cloud uses On-demand, Reserved, Spot, AI Token Plan pricing. Spot (interruptible) instances are available from $0.26/hr — interruptible instances are typically lower-cost than on-demand, suitable for fault-tolerant training jobs with checkpointing. Reserved instance pricing may be available for predictable long-running workloads — check the provider's pricing page for current committed-use rates. Always compare the effective hourly rate including egress, storage, and networking costs when evaluating total cost of ownership across providers.

Choosing the right GPU on Alibaba Cloud

GPU selection depends on model size, precision, and whether your workload is compute-bound or memory-bandwidth-bound. For LLM training above 30B parameters, H100 80GB SXM5 instances with NVLink are the standard choice — high HBM3 bandwidth and FP16 throughput make them well-suited for large transformer workloads. For inference of 7B–13B models in FP16 or BF16, A100 40GB is a common choice on many providers. RTX 4090 instances are widely used for fine-tuning, prototyping, and quantized inference (INT4/INT8) of models up to 70B. Read the H100 vs A100 guide or the GPU benchmarks for ML guide for a full breakdown.

How Alibaba Cloud pricing data is collected

Prices shown are sourced from Alibaba Cloud's public pricing API or pricing page and refreshed every 15 minutes. On-demand rates reflect the current list price for a single GPU instance in the cheapest available region. Spot prices, where available, reflect interruptible instance rates at the time of the last snapshot. All prices are in USD per hour. Daily snapshots are kept in our history archive and visualised in the GPU price history charts — useful for identifying seasonal pricing patterns and evaluating whether current rates are above or below the 30-day average.

Evaluating managed LLM inference APIs as an alternative to self-hosted GPU compute? Compare live LLM token prices across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, and many other providers. The cheapest GPU cloud guide covers the break-even analysis between self-hosted and managed inference at different request volumes.