Following the United States, major Chinese cloud providers are also raising AI infrastructure costs.

The Alibaba and Baidu cloud units will raise fees for some services by as much as 34 percent, citing surging AI demand and rising infrastructure costs, the South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday.

Alibaba Cloud said it will raise fees for services based on its AI chips by 5 to 34 percent from April 18. It will also lift fees for its cloud parallel file storage service by 30 percent.

Baidu Cloud will also raise fees for services related to AI computing power by 5 to 30 percent from April 18, and increase fees for its parallel file storage system by 30 percent.

Cui Tingting (추이팅팅), a research manager at IDC China, said hardware suppliers are quickly raising prices in line with changing supply-demand outlooks as future shortages are expected. She said this is fuelling rising supply-chain costs and leading to higher costs across the cloud market.

U.S. cloud companies are showing similar moves. Google said it will raise fees for some services by as much as 100 percent from May 1, including content delivery network (CDN) interconnect and direct peering for users in North America. Amazon Web Services (AWS) also raised fees worldwide for its EC2 Capacity Blocks service for machine learning by about 15 percent.

Cui said further price increases cannot be ruled out if supply-chain costs keep rising. She said cloud companies are also reflecting future spending on research and development and market operations in their fees. She added that recent rising tensions in the Middle East are affecting supplies of energy, chemicals and metal raw materials essential for hardware production, and could further worsen global hardware shortages.