On August 18, IDC released a report showing that China's AI public cloud service market reached 19.59 billion RMB in 2024, representing a 55.3% increase compared to 2023. Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud tied for first place in the market, followed by Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud. The growth was driven by the expansion of generative AI applications on one hand, and significant growth in machine learning training and inference demands on the other, which boosted AI market growth at both platform and application layers.

In the computer vision sub-market, China's computer vision public cloud service market reached 8.1 billion RMB in 2024, up 33.7% year-over-year compared to 2023. Tencent Cloud and Baidu Intelligent Cloud ranked first and second respectively in this segment.

In the conversational AI public cloud service market, the 2024 market size reached 2.09 billion RMB, growing 39.5% compared to 2023. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Intelligent Cloud occupied the top two positions.

In the intelligent speech public cloud service market, the 2024 market size reached 1.88 billion RMB, representing 19.5% growth compared to 2023. The top four vendors in this market were Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Intelligent Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud.

In the natural language processing public cloud service market, the 2024 market size reached 2.22 billion RMB, up 51.1% compared to 2023. Baidu Intelligent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud ranked in the top three.

In the machine learning platform public cloud service market, the 2024 market size reached 5.29 billion RMB, achieving 163.8% market growth compared to 2023. The top five vendors were Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Baidu Intelligent Cloud, and Tencent Cloud.

IDC's recommendations for technology providers include leveraging large models to comprehensively restructure cloud service architecture to help users embrace the era of comprehensive intelligence. While generative AI capabilities are currently being deployed in isolated applications, cloud vendors should consider what kind of architecture users need to build their intelligent systems when large model applications achieve broader penetration.

Focus on AI governance is crucial. As AI systems play increasingly important roles in high-risk decision-making, governance becomes critical driven by regulatory pressure, AI failures, and complex deployments. Buyers and suppliers prioritize transparency, accountability, and ethical AI use to comply with regulations and reduce risks such as algorithmic bias and data breaches.

Rethinking and building partner ecosystems in the large model era is essential. Large models, generative AI, and agents are transforming the software and services industry, allowing every technology company to develop agent products and provide AI services. Market boundaries are being reshaped, and platform vendors should reconsider new types of partners in this transformed ecosystem.

Lu Yanxia, IDC China AI Research Director, stated that this is the beginning of large models and AI starting to change the cloud service market landscape. Cloud vendors should have the courage and determination to comprehensively reshape cloud service products to help users establish fully AI-enabled architectures.