INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY

CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

This marked the second consecutive quarter of growth above 20 %.

Sustained AI demand continued to drive adoption while generating spillover effects across core cloud infrastructure services, accelerating the shift in cloud resource consumption toward production workloads. In response, leading cloud providers continued to build out AI capabilities and placed greater emphasis on the productization and role differentiation of models while strengthening the toolchains that underpin AI agent platforms.

In Q3 2025, the market shares of Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud were 36 %, 16 % and 9 % respectively.

As enterprises moved beyond earlystage AI experimentation toward broader adoption, AI increasingly drove incremental demand for core cloud infrastructure services, including compute, storage and database. This transition reflected a shift from pilot projects to production-grade deployments.

“ As AI adoption deepens, leading cloud vendors are complementing ongoing improvements in foundation model capabilities by positioning these models as functional components within a broader platform stack,” said Rachel Brindley, Senior Director, Omdia.“ Clearer role definition and tighter platform integration are becoming an increasing focus.”

During the quarter, Alibaba Cloud expanded its multimodal model portfolio.

Huawei Cloud accelerated AI adoption in core industry use cases through the colaunch of industry models. Tencent Cloud clarified model role differentiation within its Hunyuan 2.0-based HY 2.0 Think and Instruct lineup.

As AI deployments scale into production, enterprise priorities are shifting toward platform-level reliability and operational stability.

“ Individual model performance alone is no longer sufficient to meet enterprise needs in real-world use cases,” said Yi Zhang, Senior Analyst, Omdia.

“ The central challenge in scaling AI initiatives lies in orchestrating models, data, tools and workflows within complex systems in a way that enables reuse, operationalisation and commercialisation.”

Against this backdrop, leading cloud providers showed increasing convergence in AI agent platform strategies in H2 2025. Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud all began advancing their agent development platforms beyond capability demonstration toward a more engineering-led stage.

In Q3 2025, partner-driven cloud revenue represented 25 % of the market, with the share expected to grow further as ecosystem collaboration plays a larger role in translating AI adoption into business value.

Alibaba Cloud increased its market share to 36 %, maintaining its leadership position. AI-related revenues recorded triple-digit growth for nine consecutive quarters, supported by expanding enterprise adoption and strategic partnerships with Marriott, GAC Group, L’ Oréal China and Haier.

Recent upgrades focused on application enablement across the Qwen model family, including nine Qwen3-VL multimodal models and the Wan2.6 video generation series. In December, Alibaba Cloud introduced AgentRun, a serverless service supporting production-grade AI agents.

Huawei Cloud maintained its position as the second-largest provider with 14 % year-on-year growth and a 16 % market share. It co-launched the Tianji Predictive Model 1.0 with China Southern Airlines.

Tencent Cloud held around 9 % market share, constrained by limited availability of advanced AI compute resources. It launched HY 2.0 Think and Instruct and enhanced its Agent Development Platform globally. •

28

INTELLIGENT CIO APAC www. intelligentcio. com