BEIJING: E-commerce and tech giant Alibaba’s (9988.HK) cloud computing division will cut prices for its products and services by up to 50% starting Wednesday, stepping up efforts to fight for a bigger slice of China’s cloud market amid rising competition.

According to Alibaba Cloud’s website, prices for elastic computing services - the ability to quickly expand or decrease processing - using Arm and Intel-based chips will drop by 15% to 20%, while services using Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) V100 and T4 graphics processing units will drop between 41% to 47%.

The price cuts are one way for the company to attract more customers, said Zhang Yi, who tracks China’s cloud computing sector at research firm Canalys, though their actual impact will depend on the specific services clients buy.

Alibaba Cloud was one of China’s earliest domestic entrants into cloud computing, and currently supplies more than one-third of the sector in China.

However, in recent years the company has faced intensifying competition from Chinese carriers including China Unicom (0762.HK) and China Telecom (0728.HK).

In late March Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (9988.HK) announced a six-way breakup for its business divisions that would allow Alibaba Cloud and other units to raise funding independently.

Separately, Alibaba stated on Wednesday that more than 200,000 enterprises have requested beta testing for Tongyi Qianwen, the company’s AI-powered large language model.

Alibaba Cloud added that it will begin a partnership programme for Tongyi Qianwen, allowing select companies to retrain the model with their own intelligence to create industry-specific applications.

The seven companies comprising the program’s initial stage include subdivisions of China National Petroleum Corp (CNPET.UL) and China International Capital Corp (3908.HK).