Tencent Cloud will increase the price of its AI-powered coding assistant by as much as 154 percent on May 15, its third price hike of 2026. The move reflects an industry-wide shift among cloud providers to monetize surging AI demand and offset rising hardware costs. This trend is transforming the cloud sector from a competitive price war to a seller's market with stronger pricing power.
Tencent Cloud will increase the price of its AI-powered coding assistant by as much as 154 percent on May 15, reflecting a broader industry trend where global cloud providers are monetizing surging demand for artificial intelligence.
"We do not agree with 'low-efficiency pure price competition'," Li Qiang, a Tencent vice president, has stated previously, signaling the company's strategic shift toward high-quality growth. The move follows similar price increases for AI services from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, who are all grappling with soaring hardware and operational costs driven by the AI boom.
According to a company announcement on April 28, the enterprise flagship version of its CodeBuddy assistant will see its price rise to 198 yuan ($27.30) per user per month from 78 yuan, a 154 percent jump. The enterprise exclusive version will double in price to 316 yuan per month. This follows a 5 percent increase on AI computing services announced on April 9 and price adjustments to its Hunyuan model series in March.
The wave of price hikes underscores the intense demand for computing power that underpins AI applications. Research firm Omdia reported that mainland China's cloud market grew 26 percent year-on-year to $14.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, with AI driving the expansion. Analysts at Morgan Stanley project China's AI inference token consumption could grow 370-fold by 2030, suggesting that cloud providers with robust infrastructure are gaining significant pricing power in what is becoming a seller's market.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
