Major Chinese CSPs are now pushing towards making moves in the global AI markets, as Huawei, Tencent, and others allocate massive capital for global AI infrastructure.
Chinese AI Firms Now Looks to Expand Their Influence Towards Global Markets, Competing With American CSPs
With China’s AI firms dominating the domestic markets, it seems like they are starting to make moves towards the global AI industry, and this is something that the U.S surely sees with caution. In a report by the Taiwan Economic Daily, it is claimed that CSP divisions of Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent, respectively, are now working towards competing in the global cloud segment, given that they have capable AI models and apparently hardware at hand that can be called a viable alternative to Western offerings.
Developing AI infrastructure is the next big thing for governments, and firms like NVIDIA and Huawei look determined to capitalize on the billions that are expected to be poured into this segment. The report claims that Alibaba Cloud has allocated over 400 million yuan towards accelerating global AI expansion, and the firm has data centers running in more than 29 regions, apart from China. More specifically, Chinese CSPs have a dominant presence in Asia, in nations like Malaysia, Thailand and the Gulf states. While they are far away from Big Tech when it comes to CapEx, Chinese AI firms are focused more on engineering innovations.
A prime example of this is how Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Max is said to compete against OpenAI and Anthropic in multiple benchmark tests, despite “apparently” having inferior AI hardware capabilities. Similarly, DeepSeek’s R1 and the upcoming R2 LLMs are claimed to put up tough competition to Western counterparts. In terms of hardware capabilities, China is far behind America for now, but domestic firms like Huawei are making efforts to expand their influence over neighboring regions, and their Ascend chips are already being used in Malaysia.
The expansion of China’s AI firms towards global markets indicates that the competition for American CSPs is going to increase from hereon, and more importantly in regions like the Middle East, where both the US and China aim to establish their dominance.
