The B-end market has peaked, the C-end market is still an untapped frontier, and cloud vendors are scrambling to seize market territory.

Cloud vendors have launched a scramble in the B-side stock market and continued to increase investment in the emerging C-side market. According to the Economic Observer, a leading cloud vendor has internally launched a "fire-fighting operation" benchmarking against ByteDance's Volcano Engine, intensifying industry competition.

On July 28, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology released the *Cloud Computing Industry Development Research Report (2026)*. Data shows that in 2025, the scale of China's cloud computing market reached 10.692 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 29%.

From the overall market perspective, the market is advancing rapidly, but when broken down, the growth of different segments is uneven. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) remains the main body, with a scale of 520.9 billion yuan, but its growth rate has dropped from 36% in the previous year to 24%; what is really driving the overall market is PaaS (Platform as a Service), driven by the large-scale application of AI platforms, with a growth rate as high as 67% and a scale of 173.6 billion yuan.

The increment of the cloud computing market is increasingly concentrated in the AI platform layer, and the rental of underlying computing power is decelerating; the increment of new customers has peaked, and vendors have launched a scramble in the stock market. A cloud computing salesperson said that in the first half of 2026, with the emergence of a large number of OPC (One Person Company), major vendors are increasingly increasing their layout in the C-side market, trying to expand their territory in emerging fields.

According to the Economic Observer, a leading cloud vendor has internally launched a "fire-fighting operation" benchmarking against ByteDance's Volcano Engine, intensifying industry competition.

Intensifying Competition

Gartner, a global IT research and consulting firm, released the *2025 Global IaaS Public Cloud Service Market Share* on April 10. The report shows that in 2025, Alibaba Cloud's share in China's IaaS market rose from 30.1% in 2024 to 32.8%, with a year-on-year revenue growth of 34.4%, higher than the overall growth rate of 23.4% of China's IaaS market.

According to data released by Omdia (Informa), an international market research institution, on May 19, the total scale of China's AI cloud market reached 56.7 billion yuan in 2025. Alibaba Cloud ranks first with a 38.1% share, followed by Volcano Engine 20.4%, Baidu Cloud 9.4%, Tencent Cloud 6.3%, eSurfing Cloud 5.9%. The top five players account for more than 80% of the total market share.

The aforementioned cloud computing salesperson told the Economic Observer that cloud computing services have high requirements for after-sales capabilities, and new vendors lack sufficient experience and talent reserves, making the possibility of "latecomers getting ahead" relatively low. However, the several major Internet players on the current track have similar genes, their products and basic performance are gradually converging, and customer acquisition relies more on the business capabilities of front-line sales personnel, making the competition exceptionally fierce.

A cloud computing agent introduced that in addition to Alibaba Cloud, vendors including Volcano Engine and Tencent Cloud have offered certain price concessions, trying to attract stock customers with low prices; Alibaba Cloud has a huge customer base in the traditional cloud computing field, and there is no obvious trend of price reduction at present.

"Sales personnel have a certain degree of autonomy. For high-value customers, we generally offer a 20% to 30% discount on the official website price," the cloud computing agent revealed. In order to acquire customers quickly, some sales personnel will use marketing gimmicks such as "50% off or even lower" in promotion, then change their stance after successfully attracting traffic, and raise the price back to a reasonable range under the pretext of policy adjustment or end of activities. In addition, the discount available to different customers is not uniform. Some vendors will also offer targeted price reductions and provide migration support to poach customers from other players' territories.

Carving Up the B-side Market

Customer acquisition in the B-side stock market adopts different strategies according to different customer groups. For large head customers and central state-owned enterprises, vendors compete in ecological binding and after-sales service systems; while for small and medium-sized customers and scientific research users, price is a powerful lever.

The aforementioned cloud computing salesperson introduced that the cost of moving university laboratories to the cloud generally ranges from 50,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan, which is a considerable threshold for research groups with limited funds. A doctoral student studying at a university said that his research group mainly focuses on price when choosing cloud services: "There are many uses for research funds, and cloud services are only auxiliary tools. When the performance indicators are close, we will definitely choose the cheapest one."

Cloud computing services are not one-off transactions. Winning an order is only the entry ticket, and the delivery capability determines to a certain extent whether a single transaction can be converted into continuous invocation and in-depth binding. For large customers such as central state-owned enterprises, they have internal technical personnel to conduct maintenance on their own, so the burden on vendors after delivery is relatively light; but for long-tail customers such as university research groups, they lack deployment and operation and maintenance capabilities themselves, so even if vendors win the order, they still need to provide services such as auxiliary migration, training and daily on-behalf operation and maintenance. According to the aforementioned cloud computing salesperson, Alibaba Cloud is currently recognized as having more complete follow-up services, which is also the choice of most small and medium-sized B-side customers.

In terms of customer portraits, all players are delineating their B-side territories around their own product matrices. The aforementioned agent gave an example that Tencent Cloud, relying on the ecosystem of games, WeChat and QQ, covers more entertainment and communication fields, Alibaba Cloud focuses on serving the e-commerce industry, while Volcano Engine occupies a unique position in the video-related industries.

High-volume Growth in the C-side Market

Since the first half of 2026, a new change has emerged in the cloud computing sector: the C-side market is expanding rapidly. According to the salesperson, in the past six months, more and more OPC entrepreneurs have entered the market to rent servers and purchase large models, which is also the direction that vendors are increasing investment in. "It is difficult to surpass Alibaba Cloud in the B-side market, and the C-side is a larger incremental market."

Volcano Engine and Tencent Cloud have responded particularly actively to this change. Relying on the two product lines of Doubao and Seedance, as well as the booming performance of AI short dramas in the first half of the year, Volcano Engine has already accumulated a certain customer base. According to data released by IDC (International Data Corporation) in May, in China's public cloud MaaS service market, Volcano Engine ranks first with a 49.5% share, and continues to attract traffic through low-price activities such as the "AI Inclusive Season". Tencent has bet on Agent-based AI workspace WorkBuddy, whose product has grown rapidly in the C-side market.

The aforementioned cloud computing agent said that in daily sales, she will pay out of her own pocket to "invite" old customers to use WorkBuddy to cultivate customers' usage habits for such new products. "If the product is easy to use, customers will naturally pay for it." She has also given customers models or Agent products of other vendors as gifts, but the repurchase performance is not as good as WorkBuddy, and some products are even politely declined by customers.

"Even now, we still prefer to do B-side business," the aforementioned cloud computing salesperson pointed out. OPCs and other individual users make decisions quickly and are sensitive to prices, but they generally lack the ability to deploy and maintain on their own, so cloud vendors need to fill the gap to solve the usage threshold problem: either provide low-code, template-based hosting tools to reduce the difficulty of getting started, or invest manpower to provide migration and on-behalf operation and maintenance services.

In the view of this cloud computing salesperson, even if vendors acquire C-side customers, they still need continuous investment to make customers really use the products, and the profit conversion is inferior to that of the B-side market. The bustling C-side market is more about competing for traffic entrances and injecting vitality into the ecosystem, rather than being the real profit center.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Economic Observer", author: LIU Sixuan, published with authorization from 36Kr.