Alibaba's AI Momentum Builds As Qwen Coder Gains Market Share

Baidu BIDU and Alibaba Group BABA led China’s public cloud services for artificial intelligence in 2024, each capturing roughly 25% of a market that expanded 55% to 19.6 billion yuan ($2.7 billion), IDC reported Monday.

Tencent Holdings TCEHY and Huawei Technologies were the next largest providers.

IDC attributed the surge to “disruptive innovations” in AI, SCMP reported on Monday.

• Prior to 2022, demand primarily focused on traditional applications, including optical character recognition, quality inspection, and surveillance.
• By 2023, large language models powering ChatGPT-like chatbots began to dominate.
• In 2024, AI services evolved into agentic forms, enabling autonomous, task-oriented interactions. These shifts accelerated demand for AI cloud services.

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Among five AI cloud service segments, computer vision remained the largest, growing 34% to 8.1 billion yuan, led by Tencent and Baidu. Machine learning, the fastest-growing segment, soared 164% to 5.3 billion yuan, with Huawei and Alibaba at the forefront.

Alibaba stock gained over 43% year-to-date compared to Baidu’s 7% returns. According to third-party agency data, Alibaba’s artificial intelligence coding model, Qwen 3 Coder, gained global traction, strengthening its position in the intensifying AI-assisted coding market.

By mid-August, Qwen 3 Coder captured more than 20% of usage share on AI marketplace OpenRouter, ranking second only to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, which led with 31%, SCMP reported on Tuesday.

Alibaba’s Qwen team launched Qwen 3 Coder on July 23.

ByteDance rolled out its Trae coding tool earlier this year, topping 1 million monthly active users by June. In June, Baidu launched Comate AI IDE, while Tencent released CodeBuddy IDE in July.

Alibaba boosted adoption by offering free access to Qwen 3 Coder.

Price Actions: BABA stock is trading higher by 0.08% to $121.50 premarket at last check on Tuesday. BIDU is up 0.28%.

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