🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Alibaba Cloud’s recent market share gain still sits below earlier peaks

• Alibaba Cloud’s global share reached 7.7% in 2025, below the earlier Gartner peaks for prior years.
• It was the world’s third-largest infrastructure-as-a-service provider, a cloud model that delivers computing resources over the internet, with a 9.1% global share in 2019 1 and 9.5% in 2021 2.
• In 2025, it ranked as the world’s fourth-largest provider by revenue. That suggests rivals moved faster worldwide, though the sources do not name the company that passed it.
• Even with a recent AI lift, its global position looks weaker than it did from 2019 to 2021 based on the cited market share figures 12.

Regional dominance stems from scale and a bigger role for local cloud ecosystems

• Alibaba Cloud remains strong in Asia Pacific. Gartner, a technology research firm, said geopolitical fragmentation plus regulatory and compliance demands are making regional cloud ecosystems matter more 2.
• In 2021, the top four hyperscalers held 76% of the global infrastructure-as-a-service market 2. Hyperscalers are very large cloud companies that run massive data center networks, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft 2.
• Alibaba has built local data centers in Indonesia and Malaysia to deepen its position where local presence can carry weight 3. Alibaba Cloud has also described close ties to Alibaba Group’s broader ecosystem, including ecommerce and logistics 3.