Recently, IDC's report on the "China Large Model Public Cloud Service Market Analysis, 2025H1" (calculated based on external customer Tokens usage under the MaaS layer, excluding vendor-owned businesses) revealed that Volcano Engine leads with a 49.2% market share, while Alibaba Cloud follows at 27%. The market has seen an almost 400% increase compared to the entirety of 2024. Previously, Omdia's report on "China AI Cloud Market, 1H25" (calculated across the entire "IaaS+PaaS+MaaS" revenue chain) indicated that Alibaba Cloud held the top position with a 35.8% market share, with Volcano Engine at 14.8%, illustrating a "dual landscape" of China's large model public cloud market. This ranking variance reflects the transitional characteristics of China's AI cloud market moving from infrastructure competition to deeper model application cultivation, emerging a dual champion pattern involving Volcano Engine and Alibaba Cloud.
The difference in market reporting reflects various statistical dimensions but accurately portrays the developmental phases of the market. According to Omdia's data, the AI cloud market in China reached 22.3 billion yuan in the first half of 2025, covering the entire cloud computing chain, highlighting the traditional cloud providers' accumulated strengths in infrastructure. Alibaba Cloud, as the oldest and largest cloud service provider in China, ensures revenue leadership through its globally positioned computational foundation and the comprehensive service capability formed by its artificial intelligence platform, PAI.
The IDC report focuses more on the actual applications within the MaaS layer. Data shows that in the first half of 2025, the scale of China's large model public cloud service market (measured by external customer Tokens usage within the MaaS layer) reached 5.367 trillion Tokens, representing nearly a 400% growth compared to the entirety of 2024; among them, Volcano Engine topped the chart with a 49.2% share, holding nearly half of the market.
Tan Dai, president of Volcano Engine, previously stated, “A large usage volume is essential to refine large models.” The Tokens usage volume, as a vital indicator of the actual depth of model usage, supports this philosophy—real feedback produced from extensive usage can continuously optimize models across throughput, latency, and cost, promoting a positive cycle between technological iteration and market applications.
**Alibaba Cloud: The "Guardian" of a Full-Stack Ecosystem** Despite competition from emerging vendors, Alibaba Cloud has maintained its leading position through its comprehensive capabilities and ecological advantages. As a pioneer in China's cloud computing market, Alibaba Cloud has a large customer base and a solid industry foundation. It has long held the lead in total revenue under the comprehensive income statistical dimension that includes IaaS and PaaS. At the 2025 Cloud Habitat Conference, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming compared "tokens" to future "electricity," stating that by 2032, in preparation for the arrival of the Super Artificial Intelligence era (ASI), Alibaba Cloud’s global data center energy consumption will increase tenfold compared to 2022, signaling exponential growth in its computational investment.
Alibaba Cloud’s full-stack capabilities stand out in the AI cloud market. Its "Tongyi" large model family spans over 170,000 derivative models and can provide comprehensive services from model training to application deployment, combined with a globally leading computational backbone. This "IaaS+PaaS+MaaS" collaborative capability gives an advantage in catering to complex enterprise AI needs, supporting its remarkable market share in Omdia's reporting.
Additionally, Alibaba Cloud is accelerating its progress in the MaaS space. Through iterations of its "Tongyi Qianwen" series of models, its competitive edge in the MaaS layer is continuously enhancing. The IDC report shows a significant increase in its 27% share of Tokens usage compared to 2024. Its vast customer base provides a natural reservoir for the MaaS business, with potential customer conversions becoming a critical growth support.
**Volcano Engine: The "Overtaking Challenger" in the MaaS Race** As an emerging cloud provider, Volcano Engine's large model business has become the fastest-growing force in the industry. In terms of market landscape, Volcano Engine maintains a clear advantage in external customer model usage, further expanding its lead this year following a strong performance in 2024, where its market share was 46.4%. Volcano Engine possesses irreplaceable core competitiveness in scenario deployment, technological breakthroughs, and cost control.
As a cloud and AI service platform under ByteDance, Volcano Engine's large model development benefits from the extensive validation of rich internal business scenarios. The long-term, large-scale Tokens usage provides ample data support for model optimization, resulting in significant technological advantages in the multimodal large model field.
In model performance, according to the "SuperCLUE" evaluation report released by the Chinese large model benchmarking, the Doupiao large model ranked first in "model fidelity" with approximately 4% illusory rate. Its multimodal models, Seedream and Seedance, also achieved excellent results in related assessments. In commercial applications, Volcano Engine has optimized its Doupiao model's inference costs by employing sparse MoE architecture, achieving breakthroughs from "per-unit pricing" to "per-tenth pricing," significantly lowering usage thresholds.
Regarding client coverage, Volcano Engine's large model services are particularly advantageous among leading clients in various industries. As of the first half of 2025, its services have expanded to sectors including automotive, consumer goods, education, and smart terminals, with key partnership clients including Tesla, Luckin Coffee, Tsinghua University, Xiaomi, and Samsung.
Additionally, Volcano Engine is supported by an "AI cloud-native infrastructure," optimized for systematic end-to-end inference leveraging a GPU-centric architecture. Coupled with the scale advantages of its domestic business under ByteDance, it achieves a competitive pricing edge. Furthermore, through self-developed firewalls, it ensures the security and compliance of scenarios in finance and government sectors, bolstering its market competitiveness.
**The Future Market Under the Dual Champion Landscape** The competition between Volcano Engine and Alibaba Cloud embodies the clash of two distinct development paths for AI cloud: Volcano Engine represents the "model-first" logic of a new force, rapidly rising with its technological and cost advantages in the MaaS layer; Alibaba Cloud reflects the "ecosystem-first" strategy of a traditional giant, consolidating its market position through comprehensive capabilities and customer foundations.
Regarding competitive strategies, both sides are deepening industry collaborations—Volcano Engine has recently focused on cooperation in the smart terminal and automotive sectors, while Alibaba Cloud is strengthening full-stack service ties through joint construction of intelligent cockpit ecosystems with automotive manufacturers. IDC predicts that China's generative AI software will continue to grow rapidly, with the market size expected to reach 48.24 billion yuan by 2028, driven by continuous innovations in foundational models, the improvement of model development tools, and the emergence of intelligent agents.
As the market shifts from "model availability" to "application usability," the competitive focus for these two giants will move towards comprehensive capability comparisons: Volcano Engine needs to address its IaaS layer shortfalls to meet large-scale customer demands, while Alibaba Cloud must accelerate its model iteration speed to enhance the user experience in the MaaS layer. Data from the National Data Bureau shows that as of the end of June this year, daily Token consumption has exceeded 30 trillion, growing over 300 times in just a year and a half. In this Token-driven AI cloud revolution, the duel between Volcano Engine and Alibaba Cloud will propel the Chinese large model public cloud market towards a more mature ecological structure.