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 ECS GPU instances with A100, H100, and V100 across China and Southeast Asia with competitive APAC pricing and on-demand, reserved, and spot billing options. Deep integration with Alibaba's ecosystem and strong China presence make it the default GPU cloud for enterprises operating in the Chinese market or running AI workloads across Southeast Asia. A top choice for APAC-focused organizations that need broad regional coverage and competitive GPU pricing in Asia. Billing is On-demand, Reserved, Spot with a minimum commitment of None (on-demand). Available regions include CN, APAC, EU, US. On-demand GPU instances can be provisioned in minutes with no upfront cost, 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: APAC coverage; China presence; Competitive pricing. 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 94+ 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. 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. For workloads requiring the highest single-GPU throughput, H100 SXM5 instances with NVLink interconnect deliver the best performance per dollar at scale. For cost-sensitive fine-tuning or inference of models up to 13B parameters, A100 40GB or RTX 4090 instances typically offer the best value.

Alibaba Cloud billing model and cost structure

Alibaba Cloud uses On-demand, Reserved, Spot pricing. On-demand instances are billed per second or per hour depending on the instance type, with no termination fees. Spot (interruptible) instances are available from $0.26/hr — typically 40–70% cheaper than on-demand rates, suitable for fault-tolerant training jobs with checkpointing. Reserved instance pricing, where available, can reduce costs by 30–60% for predictable long-running workloads. 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 — the 3,350 GB/s HBM3 bandwidth and 989 TFLOPS FP16 throughput make them 2–2.5× faster than A100 for transformer workloads. For inference of 7B–13B models in FP16 or BF16, A100 40GB offers the best cost-per-token on most providers. RTX 4090 instances are ideal 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 retained for 90 days 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 14+ other providers. The cheapest GPU cloud guide covers the break-even analysis between self-hosted and managed inference at different request volumes.