While U.S. attention focuses on what American companies are doing with AI and cloud technology, a China-led parallel universe is emergingAlibaba and Huawei each have substantial and rapidly growing cloud businesses, as well as their own AI models and siliconThough U.S. hyperscalers will continue to lead in the U.S. and Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and the Asia Pacific regions will be key market share battlegrounds,<\/p>\n
AWS, Google, Microsoft and even Oracle<\/a> have been racking up cloud and AI headlines recently. But other major players are getting less attention in the west: Chinese cloud giants Alibaba and Huawei. AI could thrust them into the spotlight.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re seeing the emergence of a true\u00a0dual AI stack and cloud ecosystem emerging \u2014 U.S.-led vs. China-led,\u201d AvidThink Founder Roy Chua told Fierce. \u201cSo, absolutely the industry\u00a0should\u00a0pay attention\u201d to the extent that they\u2019re not already.<\/p>\n Indeed, the Chinese cloud giants are pretty hard to ignore. Alibaba Cloud is the fourth largest cloud provider in the world by market share and infrastructure-as-a-service revenue, according to data from Synergy Research Group and Gartner. It operates 89 availability zones in 29 regions spanning Asia, the Middle East as well as North America, Europe and Australia. Around half of its regions are in its home country of China.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Huawei Cloud operates 101 availability zones across 34 regions, primarily in Asia, the Middle East and South America. It also has facilities in Ireland, South Africa and Mexico, though is otherwise notably absent from North America and Europe.<\/p>\n For comparison, Microsoft Azure has the largest cloud footprint, claiming over 70 cloud regions (55 of which are listed here<\/a>). Google Cloud, meanwhile, has 42 regions<\/a> and AWS offers<\/a> 38.<\/p>\n Regions don\u2019t directly correlate to market share for a variety of reasons (some of which, yes, are geopolitical). According to Synergy Research Group\u2019s data<\/a> from July 2025, Amazon, Microsoft and Google had 30%, 20% and 13% market share, respectively, compared to Alibaba\u2019s 4% and Huawei\u2019s 2%.\u00a0 Gartner\u2019s market share numbers for the 2024 infrastructure-as-a-service market were slightly different with Amazon at 37.7%, Microsoft at 23.9%, Google at 9%, Alibaba at 7.2% and Huawei at 4.1%.<\/p>\n AI growth catalyst<\/p>\n Both Huawei and Alibaba are trying to capitalize on the AI boom to boost those percentages.<\/p>\n Alibaba in February announced plans to invest roughly $53 billion (RMB380 billion) over the next three years to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure. In July, it reported<\/a> AI demand drove Cloud revenue up 26% to $4.6 billion in its calendar Q2. It has also been building up its AI capabilities with the launch of its Qwen series of foundation models, which are being used by Alibaba\u2019s partner SAP.<\/p>\n