According to Canalys, a research firm, spending on cloud infrastructure services in Mainland China reached US$9.4 billion in the second quarter of 2024, an 8% year-on-year increase, as reported by Fast Tech on September 26.

Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud continue to dominate the market, accounting for a combined 71% market share.

Among them, Alibaba Cloud leads significantly with a 36% share, driven primarily by its public cloud business, which achieved double-digit growth in the second quarter of 2024.

The success of AI products has also contributed significantly to Alibaba Cloud's growth recovery, with the number of paying users reaching an all-time high, a quarterly growth rate of 200%, and continued triple-digit revenue growth.

This momentum has prompted Alibaba Cloud to further increase its investment in AI, launching the AI assistant "Xiaoying" in July this year, providing a knowledge base and decision support to enable automatic learning and execution of tasks.

Huawei Cloud holds a 19% market share, maintaining stable growth of 13% and steadily advancing in the AI field.

In June this year, Huawei Cloud launched the latest version of its AI mega-model, Pangu 5.0, offering various parameter configurations to meet the diverse training needs of customers.

It announced a partner capability program in collaboration with TCL, Ernst & Young, and iSoftStone, with approximately 4,500 partners currently participating in the program, having jointly developed over 500 solutions with Huawei Cloud.

Tencent Cloud ranks third with a 16% market share, having announced in June this year that it would offer its Hunyuan mega-model free of charge to newly migrated enterprise users, providing 100 million tokens as an incentive to attract more customers.

Furthermore, Tencent Cloud has launched multiple versions of the Hunyuan mega-model, including Pro, Standard, and Lite, and provides free dedicated migration tools and services to meet the diverse needs of users.

From the actions of the Big Three, it is evident that AI is now an important battlefield in cloud services, becoming a significant growth point. All three companies are continuously increasing their investment in AI and developing customized solutions for specific industries, leading to intense competition.

As the customer base of AI platforms provided by leading cloud vendors continues to expand, it is expected to drive further growth in cloud consumption in the second half of 2024.