Tencent says small clouds can’t get hardware, so big clouds can hike prices

Chinese hyperscalers (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent) are signaling cloud price hikes of 5–34% driven by AI hardware supply chain pressure, with smaller clouds losing access to datacenter equipment as suppliers prioritize hyperscalers. Tencent's CSO explicitly stated smaller providers "no longer have certainty" on supply and must buy from hyperscalers, who are passing through higher costs. A potential offset: the growing market for cheaper inferencing chips (vs. training chips) could moderate costs as LLM inference workloads scale.