In today's era of rapid technological evolution, the cloud computing market is in a constant state of flux, with major tech giants fiercely vying for dominance. Baidu Intelligent Cloud, once a formidable player leveraging Baidu's deep AI technology foundation, now stands at a pivotal juncture, confronted with unprecedented challenges and opportunities.

In the cloud computing landscape of 2024, Baidu Intelligent Cloud's performance resembles a gripping drama. On one hand, it boasts Baidu's robust AI technology as its backbone, which should be its competitive edge in the cloud computing arena; on the other hand, the market is teeming with highly skilled players, with industry giants like Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud firmly entrenched in dominant positions, leveraging their respective resource advantages and strategic layouts. Amidst this fierce competition, Baidu Intelligent Cloud is gradually being sidelined, making the battle for market share exceedingly arduous.

According to relevant data, in the 2024 ranking of China's public cloud IaaS market, Alibaba Cloud tops the list with a market share of 36.7%, followed by Tencent Cloud with 17.8%, while Baidu Intelligent Cloud's market share stands at merely 8.1%. These figures seem to narrate the tale of Baidu Intelligent Cloud's once-glorious but now-declining fortunes. Once viewed as a formidable competitor in the cloud computing market due to its profound accumulation in AI technology, how can Baidu Intelligent Cloud now carve out a niche for survival and growth amidst these giants?

Technology Leadership and Commercial Lag

Baidu Intelligent Cloud's core competitiveness has always centered around being 'AI-native'. From the launch of the 'All in AI' strategy in 2016 to the full unveiling of the ERNIE Bot 4.0 model in 2024, Baidu's investment in AI technology has been unwavering. Its number of AI patents has ranked first in China for five consecutive years, its deep learning framework PaddlePaddle boasts a global developer base exceeding 8 million, and the ERNIE Bot model flaunts a Chinese comprehension accuracy rate of 96.5%, surpassing most competitors. However, this technological edge has failed to translate into market dominance. In 2024, AI-related revenue accounted for only 18% of Baidu Intelligent Cloud's total, significantly lower than Alibaba Cloud's 35% and Huawei Cloud's 28%.

1. The Dilemma of Technological Isolation

Baidu Intelligent Cloud's AI capabilities have long been confined to laboratories and benchmark cases. Taking the ERNIE Bot model as an example, although it has showcased its prowess in fields such as education and healthcare, its scalability and replicability remain weak. In 2024, six out of the top 10 customers of Baidu Intelligent Cloud were government and central enterprise projects, with small and medium-sized enterprise coverage of less than 15%. In contrast, Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Qianwen large model has accessed 300,000 enterprises through the 'Model as a Service' (MaaS) model, covering 20 industries including retail and logistics; Huawei Cloud's Pangu large model, leveraging government and enterprise channels, has landed in over 500 smart factories in the manufacturing sector.

More critically, Baidu Intelligent Cloud's AI technology has failed to deeply integrate with cloud computing infrastructure. Its AI services primarily rely on API calls, lacking a deeply integrated ecosystem akin to that of Microsoft Azure and OpenAI. An IDC report highlights that Baidu Intelligent Cloud lags behind Alibaba Cloud by 1.5 technological generations in the completeness of 'AI+Cloud' scenario-based solutions.

2. Ecological Shortcomings

Baidu Intelligent Cloud's ecological layout has consistently struggled to break free from the cycle of isolation. As of 2024, the number of its partners stood at only 12,000, whereas Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud's ecological partners have surpassed 150,000 and 80,000, respectively. In key industries, Baidu Intelligent Cloud lacks allies: in the financial cloud sector, Tencent Cloud has forged a deeply interconnected 'circle of friends' through WeBank and Ping An Cloud; in the manufacturing cloud sector, Huawei Cloud has collaborated with Sany Heavy Industry and Gree to build an industrial internet platform; even ByteDance Cloud has attracted over 500,000 small and medium-sized merchants through the traffic advantage of Douyin E-commerce.

Baidu Intelligent Cloud's ecological shortcomings have directly contributed to customer loss. In 2024, its customer retention rate in the financial industry plummeted from 72% to 53%. ByteDance migrated its AI content review business from Baidu Cloud to its self-built platform, while NIO shifted to jointly developing autonomous driving models with Huawei Cloud. An industry analyst bluntly stated: 'No matter how robust Baidu Intelligent Cloud's AI technology is, without ecological support, it's akin to a supercar without a gas station.'

Baidu Intelligent Cloud's 'Surrounded by Challenges'

Competition in China's cloud computing market has entered the stage of 'multi-dimensional strangulation'. Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud, leveraging their full-chain advantages in technology, ecology, and resources, continue to squeeze the survival space of second-tier players; meanwhile, new forces such as ByteDance Cloud and JD Cloud are fiercely eroding niche markets with vertical scenarios as their breakthrough points.

Alibaba Cloud: Dual Dominance of Technological Hegemony and Ecological Empire

With the hardcore strength of its 'Feitian' operating system and self-developed Xuantie 800 chip, Alibaba Cloud held a 36.7% share of China's public cloud IaaS market in 2024. Its Tongyi large model, through the 'Cloud and DingTalk Integration' strategy, seamlessly integrates AI capabilities into the daily operations of 20 million enterprises. More alarmingly, Alibaba Cloud's ecological empire has formed a 'snowball' effect: 100,000 ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), 1,500 SaaS partners, and even Huawei's HarmonyOS system have chosen to access Alibaba Cloud's database.

Huawei Cloud: Aggressive Expansion in the Government and Enterprise Market

Huawei Cloud ranked third with a 12.1% share in 2024, with its killer app being its full-stack 'Cloud + 5G + Hardware' capability. In the government and enterprise market, relying on 30 regional nodes and 300 edge computing centers nationwide, Huawei Cloud has secured over 70% of smart city orders. The combination of Ascend AI chips and Kunpeng servers allows it to offer 40% lower costs for large model training compared to Baidu Intelligent Cloud. A government customer candidly stated: 'We chose Huawei Cloud not because it has the strongest technology, but because from the data center to applications, they can provide a 'turnkey' service.'

ByteDance Cloud: A Dimensional Strike from the Traffic Empire

Leveraging the global traffic advantage of Douyin and TikTok, ByteDance Cloud emerged as a dark horse in 2024, with its market share surging from 2.1% to 5.3%. Its 'Volcano Engine' encapsulates core capabilities such as video processing and recommendation algorithms as cloud services, directly stealing 20% of Baidu Intelligent Cloud's audio and video customers. In the Southeast Asian market, TikTok's daily average of 1 billion video plays provides a natural global springboard for ByteDance Cloud.

Deep Cultivation or Global Expansion?

As the global cloud computing battlefield shifts from 'incremental plundering' to 'stock strangulation', Baidu Intelligent Cloud's strategic balance is violently swaying: on one hand, there's the AI technology closed loop on which it depends for survival; on the other, there's the ecological openness that is vital to its growth; one front is the intense internal competition in the domestic market, and the other is the unknown challenges of a global expedition. Every choice could be either a lifeline or a dead-end; every turn could be creating history or writing an epitaph.

Baidu spent a decade building the 'Tower of Babel' of AI technology, only to discover fatal cracks at its foundation: when the code of the PaddlePaddle framework becomes a hindrance, and when the parameters of the large model turn into isolated stones in an ecological desert, closure brings not security but suffocation. Once technological advantages become strategic shackles, the stronger the self-research capability, the deeper the ecological fragmentation, with developers voting with their feet, customers defecting due to compatibility issues, and partners switching sides in interface wars. History has long proven that the throne of cloud computing never belongs to 'technological dictators', but only to 'ecological architects'.

The true life-and-death line does not lie in the strategic choice itself, but in the cognitive revolution behind it.

Opening up the ecosystem is not about tearing down walls, but about reconstructing the walls' material from 'code cement' to 'interest concrete'; globalization is not geographical migration, but capability reconstruction evolving from 'Chinese AI' to 'AI in China'. When Baidu still uses an engineer's mindset to deconstruct business propositions and a laboratory logic to plan market territories, its strategic choices are doomed to be outdated. The final outcome of the cloud war is not about the millimeter difference in technical parameters, but about the dimensionality reduction strike of ecological discourse power; not about fighting for every inch of the regional market, but about the ability to define global rules.

At this juncture, Baidu Intelligent Cloud resembles a classical warrior standing amidst the digital wave, wielding an AI sharp blade yet trapped in the shackles of traditional warfare. To cut through fate, what is needed is not a sharper knife, but a new set of tactics belonging to the cloud era: either completely break the closed loop and let technology flow freely; or reconstruct the dimensions of competition, letting AI leap out of the category of tools and evolve into the underlying protocol of a new commercial civilization. Otherwise, all debates about openness and closure, deep cultivation and going abroad, are merely spiritual internal friction at the twilight of an empire.