<div id="readability-page-1">China is rolling out a campaign to sharply cut artificial intelligence computing costs for small businesses, as demand for processing power surges alongside a fresh round of price increases by domestic providers. The country plans to build an “inclusive computing service network” – offering broad coverage, lower costs and improved service quality – to reduce barriers for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) seeking access to computing resources, according to a notice published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on its official website on Thursday. Under the plan, the ministry will coordinate local telecom carriers and computing service providers to develop computing facilities – including data centres and integrated training and inference systems – close to national public service platforms for SMEs and specialised industrial clusters across the country. The aim is to provide businesses with more readily accessible computing support. It will also encourage providers to introduce more flexible pricing models – including billing based on the usage time of central processing units, graphics processing units or tokens – and to offer subsidies or vouchers for computing power. The push comes as local AI and cloud service providers raise prices, partly due to rising costs of hardware such as AI chips and memory.  Major Chinese cloud providers including Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings have all announced price increases for AI and storage services in recent weeks. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Tencent, among the first to move, raised prices for some AI cloud services by more than 400 per cent last month. Alibaba and Baidu followed with increases ranging from 5 to 30 per cent for certain computing and chip-related offerings, effective this month. Analysts said the price hikes reflected a surge in demand driven by the rapid adoption of AI. Rising token usage – the basic units AI systems use to process data – had pushed up consumption of computing resources, creating supply constraints, according to Ying Ying, an analyst at CSC Financial. Tokens roughly correspond to fragments of language, such as words or characters, and most AI services charge based on usage. An English word equates to about 1.3 tokens, while a single Chinese character counts as roughly 2.5 tokens. As usage increases, so too does demand for computing power, pushing up costs. That demand is accelerating quickly. ByteDance said the daily average token usage of its Doubao AI model surpassed 120 trillion in March, nearly doubling from about 60 trillion within three months. Meanwhile, the number of enterprise clients consuming more than one trillion cumulative tokens on ByteDance’s Volcano Engine cloud platform had risen to 140, up from 100 a year earlier, according to Tan Dai, president of the platform. </div>

KBAB

CLOU

00241

BABX

<p>China is launching a campaign to reduce AI computing costs for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) amid rising prices from local providers. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology plans to create an "inclusive computing service network" to enhance access to computing resources. This initiative includes developing data centers and flexible pricing models, as major cloud providers like Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu have recently increased their prices due to heightened demand for AI services. Analysts attribute these price hikes to a surge in token usage, which drives up computing resource consumption.</p>

China moves to cut AI computing costs for SMEs as cloud prices surge