Mainland China's cloud infrastructure services market posted 26% year-on-year growth in Q4 2025, reaching $14.7 billion — its third consecutive quarter above 20% — as AI demand migrated from raw model consumption to enterprise deployment and agentic workloads, according to research published Monday by Omdia.
The expansion is forecast to continue at the same pace through 2026, with Omdia projecting 26% full-year growth. The driver mix is changing, though. AI-related spending now supports rising demand for compute, storage and databases alongside model APIs, as private AI rollouts pull in traditional cloud resources that had been flat or declining.
Attention is shifting toward agents. Omdia's Rachel Brindley describes it as a transition from AI as a discrete technical tool to AI as an infrastructure growth engine. Yi Zhang, senior analyst at the firm, frames the competitive conversation similarly: the race among Chinese cloud vendors is moving from foundational model quality toward how reliably those models can be packaged into products that fit real business workflows.
The three largest providers held 64% of the market between them in Q4. Alibaba Cloud led at 37%, with revenue from AI-related products posting triple-digit year-on-year growth for the tenth consecutive quarter — a run that predates the current wave of GenAI enthusiasm by several years. The company launched Wukong, an enterprise-grade agent platform, and reported a sixfold increase in average daily token consumption on its Model Studio platform over three months. Huawei Cloud held 17%, advancing through industry-specific deployments including a cloud-edge-device pathology solution and the CodeArts coding agent. Tencent Cloud, at around 10%, upgraded its agent development platform and released its first agent product landscape in March, alongside plans for a new Frankfurt availability zone.
Each vendor is betting on a different part of the agent stack. Tencent is building into messaging interfaces. Alibaba is reinforcing the enterprise platform layer. Huawei is going vertical through sector-specific solutions. None of those bets are incompatible — but they do represent genuinely different views of where the margin will settle.
Partner-driven cloud revenue accounted for 25% of the market in Q4 2025, with Omdia expecting that share to rise as channel partners take on the work of translating AI adoption into measurable business outcomes.
As enterprises embed AI across a wider range of real-world business scenarios, deployment models, data environments, and operational frameworks are becoming increasingly complex. As a result, demand for cloud resources is extending beyond model consumption to the broader infrastructure layer.
It is moving beyond models and platform capabilities alone toward the deliverability and operational maturity of agent products, as well as the depth of their integration with real-world business scenarios.
