Alibaba Cloud gains edge in agentic AI race

Alibaba Cloud has been named a Leader in Omdia’s Market Radar for Agentic AI Cloud Titans in Asia & Oceania, 2026, strengthening its position in a fast-expanding field where cloud providers are racing to turn generative AI into autonomous enterprise systems.

The ranking places Alibaba Cloud among the region’s most advanced providers of agentic AI infrastructure and development platforms. The company achieved the highest scores across six of nine evaluation dimensions, with its full-stack agentic AI approach highlighted as a key differentiator. That framework spans infrastructure, foundation models, model services, enterprise development tools and deployment systems designed to help companies build AI agents capable of planning, reasoning and executing tasks across business workflows.

The recognition comes as agentic AI shifts from experimental pilots to enterprise adoption. The Asia and Oceania market for agentic AI software is projected to grow from $782 million in 2025 to $11.2 billion by 2030, implying a compound annual growth rate of about 94 per cent. The surge reflects demand from banks, retailers, logistics companies, manufacturers and public-sector organisations seeking systems that can automate multi-step work rather than merely generate text, code or images.

Alibaba Cloud’s pitch rests on a vertically integrated stack. Its Qwen foundation models underpin a growing range of cloud services, while Model Studio gives developers access to Qwen-Max, Qwen-Plus, Qwen-Turbo, Qwen-VL, Wan and other model families. The company has also been expanding Platform for AI, Lingjun infrastructure and agent-building toolkits intended to make AI deployment easier for enterprises that lack large in-house research teams.

The company’s Singapore push has become central to its international AI strategy. At its first international Qwen Conference in Singapore in May, Alibaba Cloud introduced Qwen3.7-Max through Model Studio in the Singapore region, unveiled Qwen Cloud as an AI-native platform, and launched agent products aimed at helping companies build and manage autonomous systems. The Skills portal converts capabilities across more than 60 cloud products into agent-callable functions, allowing AI agents to interact with databases, security tools, big-data services and operations systems.

Alibaba Cloud’s commercial momentum has also improved. Cloud Intelligence Group revenue rose 38 per cent year on year to RMB41.63 billion in the January-March quarter, while external cloud revenue grew 40 per cent. AI-related products accounted for about 30 per cent of external cloud revenue and delivered triple-digit growth for the eleventh consecutive quarter. Annualised AI-related product revenue surpassed RMB35.8 billion, indicating that enterprise demand has moved beyond proof-of-concept budgets.

The company is investing heavily to defend that position. Alibaba has indicated that spending on AI and cloud infrastructure will exceed its earlier three-year plan of up to RMB380 billion, as executives prioritise market share and capacity expansion over near-term margins. That strategy carries risks. The group’s earnings have been pressured by high capital expenditure, competition in commerce and infrastructure costs linked to advanced computing demand.

The broader market remains intensely contested. Regional and global cloud providers are building agentic AI platforms that combine foundation models, orchestration layers, retrieval systems, governance tools and specialised compute. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud are all competing for enterprise workloads tied to automation, coding agents, customer-service agents and industry-specific decision systems.

Alibaba Cloud’s advantage in Asia rests partly on its ability to link AI models with commerce, logistics, finance, cloud and developer ecosystems. Its Qwen family has gained traction among developers because of open-source releases and multilingual capabilities, while its enterprise services are being positioned for customers that need lower latency, data-residency options and region-specific compliance controls. The company also benefits from its leadership in Asia-Pacific infrastructure-as-a-service revenue, where it held a 22.5 per cent regional share in 2025.

The agentic AI market, however, faces unresolved issues around reliability, accountability and security. Autonomous agents can call tools, access corporate data and act across software systems, raising concerns over permission controls, audit trails, hallucinated actions and exposure of sensitive information. Enterprise buyers are increasingly looking for guardrails, monitoring, role-based access and human approval mechanisms before allowing agents to handle financial, legal or operational decisions.