Chinese Big Tech companies are making bold moves to challenge the dominance of Western cloud service providers in the global AI market. 
With companies like Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent ramping up their investment in AI infrastructure, the competition for global AI supremacy is intensifying. These companies are positioning themselves to compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, despite the gap in capital expenditure.
According to a report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily, the cloud service divisions of Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent are taking significant steps to enter the global cloud computing segment. Each of these companies boasts advanced AI models and cutting-edge hardware that could serve as a viable alternative to Western technology. The report also highlights that Alibaba Cloud has already allocated over 400 million yuan to accelerate its global AI expansion, and its data centers now span across 29 regions outside of China.
Despite their strong domestic presence in China, these companies are particularly focused on expanding in regions like Asia, including Malaysia, Thailand, and the Gulf states. Alibaba’s AI model, Qwen2.5-Max, has already demonstrated its ability to challenge Western AI models like OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude in several benchmark tests, even though it is said to be lacking in hardware compared to its Western counterparts. Huawei’s Ascend chips, which are already deployed in Malaysia, show that China’s hardware industry is making significant strides.
Although China lags behind the U.S. in terms of hardware, its AI firms are catching up quickly by emphasizing engineering innovation over sheer capital spending. As global demand for AI infrastructure surges, companies like NVIDIA and Huawei are seizing the opportunity to invest heavily in this growing market. The race for global AI leadership is now poised to heat up, especially in regions like the Middle East, where both China and the U.S. are vying for dominance.