Alibaba (HKG:9988) and Baidu (HKG:9888) led China's public cloud services market supporting artificial intelligence last year, as spending surged 55% to 19.6 billion yuan, the South China Morning Post reported Monday, citing consultancy IDC.

The two firms each held about 25% of the market, followed by Tencent Holdings (HKG:0700) and Huawei Technologies, according to the report.

IDC reportedly said the boom was driven by growing adoption of generative and agentic AI, with demand shifting from traditional applications such as optical character recognition to large language models.

Within the market, computer vision remained the largest segment at 8.1 billion yuan, while machine learning was the fastest-growing, jumping 164% to 5.3 billion yuan, the report said.

(Market Chatter news is derived from conversations with market professionals globally. This information is believed to be from reliable sources but may include rumor and speculation. Accuracy is not guaranteed.)