China has the second-largest cloud market in the world with 10.8% of the worldwide total. Canalys conducted a research on the Chinese cloud market in Q4 2019. The data shows that the total spend in China reached 3.3 billion. The research indicates that Alibaba Cloud has nearly half of total spend with a 46.4% share. While Tencent Cloud increased its share to 18.0%, Baidu AI Cloud moved into third place with an 8.8% share.
Succeeded in responding quickly the COVID-19 outbreak
It is sure that the global COVID-19 outbreak has been affecting cloud demand because of the growing shift to the cloud of the companies. All three cloud companies responded quickly to the COVID-19 outbreak in China at the beginning of 2020. They are successful in providing access to on-demand compute, artificial intelligence, and other services to support government departments, businesses, research institutes, and students.
Yih Khai Wong, the Senior Analyst, talked about the research results, saying,
Yih Khai Wong, Senior Analyst, Canalys
“The benefits of cloud computing were demonstrated by the leading cloud service providers in response to the escalating coronavirus crisis. They rapidly deployed continuity measures for organizations and established resource-intensive workloads to analyze vast datasets. Cloud companies opened their platforms, allowing new and existing customers to use more resources for free to help maintain operations. They provided free access for research institutions to accelerate drug screening for potential vaccines. Students also benefited by accessing online learning tools setup on the platforms after schools were closed.
Alibaba Cloud offered credits to organizations to buy its Elastic Compute Service, cybersecurity, and other services. The compnay made Computational and AI Platforms free to help research, analyze, and treat COVID-19. Alibaba Cloud opened Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19 (GMCC). Tencent Cloud launched Cloud Office Portfolio to support remote working and made its platform available to research teams from universities across the country. Businesses and students can use for free both audio and video chat tools during the epidemic. Similar to Alibaba Cloud, Baidu AI Cloud opened its platform and AI algorithm for free to research institutions.
When we look at the full-year 2019, cloud infrastructure services spend in China increased 63.7% to exceed US$10.7 billion. Alibaba Cloud was ranked number one. Tencent Cloud was the second largest, with a 17.3% share. AWS was third, followed by Baidu AI Cloud. For 2020, more application has been shifting to the cloud. Cloud companies that were quick to support existing and new customers over the last three months will be at the top.
