According to the latest research from Omdia, cloud infrastructure services spending in Mainland China reached USD 14.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, representing a 26% year-on-year increase. Market growth accelerated further compared to the previous quarter, marking the third consecutive quarter of growth exceeding 20%. Omdia forecasts that China's cloud infrastructure services spending will continue to grow by 26% in 2026.

In Q4 2025, AI remained the core driver of market growth, but its influence has expanded from model-related demand to broader cloud infrastructure consumption and enterprise-grade deployment capabilities. Simultaneously, market focus is gradually shifting from pure model capabilities to product forms that are more closely aligned with actual business processes, such as AI Agents. The competitive focus is increasingly concentrating on product maturity, operational capabilities, and deep integration with business scenarios. As AI applications become further embedded into real business processes, ecosystem collaboration involving cloud platforms, developers, solution partners, and industry customers will also become more critical.

The Mainland China cloud infrastructure services market continued its recovery trend in Q4 2025, with a 26% year-on-year expansion. AI-related demand remains the core growth engine. As enterprise AI adoption deepens, the factors supporting market growth are becoming more diversified: beyond the expansion of model usage, the widespread implementation of enterprise AI, the expansion of private AI deployments, and the unleashing of AI-driven demand for traditional cloud resources like computing, storage, and databases are collectively driving the increase in cloud infrastructure spending.

"AI's role is undergoing a deeper transformation," said Rachel Brindley, Senior Director at Omdia. "It is evolving from a standalone technical capability into a significant engine driving overall infrastructure demand. As enterprises embed AI into more real business scenarios, deployment models, data environments, and operational frameworks are becoming increasingly complex. Consequently, the demand for cloud resources is expanding from singular model usage to broader infrastructure layers."

AI commercialization is also progressively moving from interactive applications, represented by Chatbots, towards execution-oriented applications, represented by Agents. The rapid rise of OpenClaw in China has further heightened market attention on Agents. More importantly, it has provided a clearer view of how Agents can connect workflows, tool invocation, and external systems through conversational interfaces, packaging them into product forms that better fit business processes.

"As conversational interfaces, workflows, and enterprise systems are increasingly incorporated into the invocation and execution chains of Agents, the focus of market competition is beginning to shift," said Yi Zhang, Senior Analyst at Omdia. "Competition is extending further from model and platform capabilities themselves to the deliverability of Agent products, operational maturity, and the depth of their integration with real business scenarios."

As this trend becomes more pronounced, leading Chinese cloud providers are accelerating their strategic layouts from different angles. Tencent Cloud is placing greater emphasis on the value of the interface layer, accelerating its Agent product strategy around mainstream instant messaging platforms and its existing ecosystem, exploring the transformation of messaging and chat interfaces into entry points for Agent invocation and task execution. Alibaba Cloud is focusing more on building enterprise platform-layer capabilities, strengthening its enterprise-grade Agent platform and workflow execution abilities to support the large-scale implementation of Agents in business processes. Huawei Cloud continues to advance AI deployment through industry-specific scenarios, emphasizing the synergistic development of models, platforms, and solution capabilities.

As Agents move closer to real business processes, the importance of ecosystem collaboration is also rising. In Q4 2025, partner-driven cloud revenue already accounted for 25% of the market, and this proportion is expected to increase further as partners play a greater role in translating AI applications into business value.

In Q4 2025, Alibaba Cloud maintained its leading position in the China cloud infrastructure market with a 37% market share. Simultaneously, its AI-related product revenue achieved triple-digit year-on-year growth for the tenth consecutive quarter. Alibaba Cloud continued to strengthen its full-stack AI portfolio by launching Qwen3.5 and further upgrading its Model Studio (Bailian) platform. This upgrade expanded the platform's support for Agent development and multimodal knowledge management, adding new capabilities such as long-term memory, data connectors, templates, and MCP services, driving a six-fold increase in the daily average token consumption of Model Studio's public model APIs within three months. Alibaba Cloud also launched Wukong, an enterprise-grade AI-native Agent platform, further extending its model and platform capabilities into more practical enterprise AI deployment scenarios. Additionally, in March, Alibaba Cloud opened its fourth data center in Japan, continuing to expand its regional infrastructure footprint.

Huawei Cloud maintained its position as the second-largest provider in the China cloud infrastructure market in Q4 2025, with a 17% market share. Huawei Cloud continues to advance its AI strategy through industry-specific deployment and ecosystem collaboration. In February, Huawei Cloud launched the "Industry AI Dream Factory" and introduced a dedicated zone for Smart Healthcare, integrating model, platform, and solution capabilities around medical scenarios. It simultaneously launched a Smart Pathology Cloud-Edge-End solution to accelerate AI adoption in the healthcare industry. Furthermore, Huawei Cloud launched the CodeArts Coding Agent, providing developers and enterprises with engineered intelligent programming capabilities; user numbers for this product grew sevenfold after its public beta. In March, Huawei Cloud upgraded its China partner policy and announced a dedicated AI ecosystem fund of CNY 200 million (USD 28.9 million) to further increase support for AI ecosystem partners.

Tencent Cloud held approximately a 10% share of the China cloud infrastructure market in Q4 2025. During the quarter, Tencent Cloud further advanced its Agent strategy from development capability building towards productization and practical deployment. In January, Tencent Cloud upgraded its Agent Development Platform (ADP), enhancing support for multi-agent orchestration, GraphRAG, a plugin ecosystem, and engineering capabilities. The company also launched products like WorkBuddy and QClaw, extending Agent capabilities into more application scenarios. At the end of March, Tencent Cloud released its first comprehensive Agent product portfolio overview and upgraded its MaaS platform to TokenHub, further integrating related products and capabilities to form a more unified Agent product system. Regarding infrastructure, Tencent Cloud also announced plans to add a new cloud availability zone in Frankfurt, Germany, to further strengthen its presence in Europe.