China the world leader in cloud service growth

China's cloud service market has taken a leading role in the world in terms of growth, with Alibaba Cloud still in pole position and Baidu Cloud's revenue witnessing the fastest growth increase according to a report on guancha.cn, an online news and comments aggregator, on Thursday.

Cloud infrastructure service expenditures in the Chinese mainland witnessed 21 percent year-on-year growth in the first quarter of this year, reaching $7.3 billion and accounting for 13 percent of global cloud infrastructure spend, market research company Canalys reported on Wednesday.

China's top four cloud service vendors — Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud — accounted for 79 percent of total expenditure in China in Q1, up 19 percent year-on-year.

In terms of the global cloud computing market, Alibaba Cloud was among the world's top three cloud service vendors in 2021 following Amazon and Microsoft, according to data from global market consultancy IDC.

Currently, China's hyperscalers are rapidly expanding their abilities to provide solutions for industry customers by building a network of specialized ecosystem partners across different vertical industries, according to Canalys VP Alex Smith.

As China's perennial market share leader with continuous growth momentum, Alibaba Cloud continued to lead the cloud infrastructure services market in Q1 2022, accounting for 36.7 percent of total spend, an increase of 12 percent year-on-year, Canalys reported.

Huawei Cloud increased 11 percent to take an 18 percent market share in the first quarter of the year. The company has won the cooperation of over 100 enterprises through ecological integration with Huawei's terminal business, including PCs, smartphones and IoT.

The market share of Tencent Cloud grew to 15.7 percent in Q1 from 13.7 percent in the same period last year. This year the company will focus on profitable growth rather than business volume growth.

Accounting for 8.4 percent of the market share in the same period, Baidu AI Cloud combines cloud services with AI technology along with continued substantial investment in its business. The company is also increasing its adoption rate in manufacturing, water supply and energy through its Kaiwu Industrial Internet Platform.

Cloud storage has become a popular choice for IT enterprises and cloud services are moving up the stack from data center offerings to more industry-specific solutions, said Yi Zhang, a research analyst with Canalys.

"Cloud infrastructure services" refers to services that provide infrastructure and platforms as a service. This excludes software-as-a-service expenditures directly but includes revenue generated from the infrastructure services consumed to host and operate them, according to Canalys.