The Zhitong Finance App learned that on October 29, the “China AI Software Market Semi-Annual Tracking, 26H1” recently released by the International Data Corporation (IDC), shows that in the first half of 2026, Alibaba Cloud's share of the MaaS market for China's major language models was 46.6%, while Smart Spectrum and Volcano Engine ranked second and third with 10.6% and 10.2% respectively.
This data is calculated based on revenue metrics, and the big language model is calculated separately from modals such as images and videos. In the first half of the year, the big language model accounted for 47.0% of China's MaaS market revenue, making it the largest model. IDC pointed out that most of the needs of enterprises for knowledge questions and answers, code generation, and intelligent organization are centered around text, and large models are moving from auxiliary office to directly undertaking production tasks.
The overall MaaS market in China is still growing rapidly. The market size reached RMB 10.63 billion in the first half of the year, up 889.4% year on year. The share of China's public cloud PaaS market rose to 21.0% from 5.2 percent in the second half of 2025.
Alibaba Cloud's lead in the big language model market is Alibaba's simultaneous investment at the three levels of model, chip, and cloud. Pingtouge's AI chip Zhenwu has been deployed on a large scale on Alibaba Cloud, and self-developed AI supernodes support efficient reasoning with large models with more than 2 trillion parameters. The new-generation AI chip Zhenwu V900 released in September has 3 times the performance of the Zhenwu M890, and a single cluster can be expanded to 500,000 cards, which can support training and reasoning for cutting-edge models. The Qwen model was quickly iterated to Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters, and plans are also being made to train new models with parameters ranging from 5 trillion to 10 trillion.
Alibaba (09988) is also continuing to increase its investment in computing power, and plans to expand the scale of the global data center operated by Alibaba Cloud to more than 20 GW by 2032. The latest financial report shows that for the quarter ending June 30, the revenue of its AI Cloud and Computing Services segment increased 45% year over year to 48.44 billion yuan.
IDC believes MaaS is becoming the most important source of growth for cloud service providers in the next few years. In competition in this market, model ability, reasoning efficiency, and computational power scale, unit cost, and supply chain certainty are the hardest abilities for manufacturers to replicate.