CLOUD
INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY
Report shows Mainland China’ s cloud infrastructure market accelerates
According to new research by Omdia, Mainland China’ s cloud infrastructure services market reached US $ 13.4 billion in Q3 2025, growing 24 % year-on-year. 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 towards production workloads.
In response, leading cloud providers continued to build out AI capabilities. They also placed greater emphasis on the productisation and role differentiation of models, while strengthening the toolchains that underpin AI agent platforms.
In Q3 2025, Mainland China’ s cloud infrastructure services market continued to rebound, with year-on-year growth reaching 24 %. As enterprises moved beyond early-stage AI experimentation towards broader adoption, AI increasingly drove incremental demand for core cloud infrastructure services, including compute, storage and database.
“ 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 at 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 co-launch of industry models; and 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 towards 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 at 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 towards a more engineering-led, operationally scalable stage, with systematic upgrades across MCPs, workflows, knowledge bases and plugin frameworks supporting this shift. These developments are laying the groundwork for the commercialisation of Generative AI.
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. n www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO APAC
29