Alibaba AI Momentum Builds As Qwen Coder Gains Market Share – Alibaba Gr Hldgs (NYSE:BABA), Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU)

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.

Also Read: Alibaba Launches AI-Powered Agent To Automate Merchant Operations

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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