Alibaba Cloud ranks first with a 46.6% share of China's large language model MaaS market.

On October 29, the latest "China AI Software Market Semiannual Tracker, 26H1" released by International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that in the first half of 2026, Alibaba Cloud held a 46.6% share of China's large language model MaaS market, with Z.AI and Volcano Engine ranking second and third at 10.6% and 10.2%, respectively. The data is calculated on a revenue basis and separates large language models from modalities such as image and video. In the first half of the year, large language models accounted for 47.0% of revenue in China's MaaS market, making them the largest modality. IDC noted that enterprises' demand for knowledge Q&A, code generation, and agent orchestration is mostly text-centric, and large models are moving from assisting office work to directly undertaking production tasks. China's MaaS market as a whole is still growing rapidly. In the first half of the year, the market size reached RMB10.63 billion, up 889.4% year on year, and its share of China's public cloud PaaS market rose from 5.2% in the second half of 2025 to 21.0%. Alibaba Cloud's lead in the large language model market is backed by Alibaba's simultaneous investment across three layers: models, chips, and cloud. T-Head's Zhenwu AI chip has already been deployed at scale on Alibaba Cloud, and its self-developed AI super node supports efficient inference for large models with more than 2 trillion parameters. The new-generation AI chip Zhenwu V900, released in September, delivers 3 times the performance of Zhenwu M890, can scale to 500,000 cards in a single cluster, and can support the training and inference of frontier models. The Qwen model has rapidly iterated to Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters, and new models with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters are also planned for training. Alibaba (09988) is also continuing to increase its computing power investment, planning to expand the scale of global data centers operated by Alibaba Cloud to more than 20GW by 2032. Its latest financial report showed that in the quarter ended June 30, revenue from its AI cloud and computing power services segment rose 45% year on year to RMB48.44 billion. IDC believes that MaaS is becoming the most important growth source for cloud service providers in the coming years. In competition in this market, model capabilities, inference efficiency, and the scale, unit cost, and supply chain certainty of computing power are the capabilities that vendors find hardest to replicate.