Industry Findings: Cloud compute adoption in China continues to be driven by large-scale enterprise digitization, strong domestic cloud ecosystems, and strict national requirements for data sovereignty and operational oversight. Enterprises across technology, manufacturing, retail, and public services are expanding compute usage to support enterprise IT operations, digital commerce platforms, and analytics pipelines while aligning with regulatory frameworks governing data protection and system security. A clear structural signal appeared in May-2024 when national authorities reinforced guidance on compliant cloud usage for enterprise and public-sector systems, emphasizing domestic hosting, operational transparency, and governance controls. That direction has strengthened preference for private and hybrid cloud architectures when handling sensitive and mission-critical workloads. Since then, organizations have relied heavily on general-purpose and memory-optimized virtual machines for transactional processing and analytics, while accelerated compute supports AI model development and training. Through 2025, adoption has remained disciplined, with enterprises prioritizing reliability, regulatory alignment, and incremental scaling rather than aggressive capacity growth. Cloud compute demand in China remains supported by domestic infrastructure investment and long-term enterprise modernization programs.
Industry Player Insights: The competitive landscape in China is shaped by Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Baidu AI Cloud. In Jul-2024, Huawei Cloud expanded compute capacity supporting enterprise and public-sector workloads hosted within China, improving availability for regulated industries. In Jan-2025, Alibaba Cloud increased availability of compute-optimized instances for analytics and AI workloads, improving performance consistency for large-scale enterprise deployments.