Alibaba holds wide lead over rivals in China’s AI cloud market

Alibaba Group Holding captured more than a third of China’s artificial intelligence cloud services market in the first half of this year, surpassing the combined share of its three closest rivals and solidifying its lead over competitors, according to a report from research firm Omdia.

With a 35.8 per cent market share, Alibaba Cloud significantly outperformed ByteDance’s Volcano Engine, which ranked second at 14.8 per cent. Huawei Cloud followed with 13.1 per cent, while Tencent Cloud held 7 per cent. Baidu Cloud placed fourth, with a 6.1 per cent share, according to the report published on Monday.

Omdia forecast that the Chinese market for AI cloud services, comprising computing infrastructure optimised for generative AI tasks, would more than double in 2025 to 51.8 billion yuan (US$7.3 billion), up from 20.83 billion yuan in 2024. From 2025 to 2030, the sector was expected to grow at an annual rate of 26.8 per cent.

Alibaba, owner of the Post, is investing heavily in AI and cloud infrastructure, developing what it calls “full-stack AI capabilities”. That includes its Qwen family of large language models, as well as a range of cloud servers, cloud container services, databases and developer tools.

Alibaba Cloud’s Apsara conference in Hangzhou, China, in September 2024. Photo: Xinhua

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