HANGZHOU / SEATTLE — In a milestone that industry analysts have long anticipated but few expected so soon, fresh market research published Saturday by Synergy Research Group and IDC shows that Alibaba Cloud has overtaken Amazon Web Services to claim the top position in Asia-Pacific cloud infrastructure market share for the first quarter of 2026. The figures, released to coincide with Alibaba's annual cloud developer summit in Hangzhou, show Alibaba Cloud holding 31.4 percent of the regional market compared to AWS's 29.8 percent — a gap that would have been unthinkable just two years ago.
The shift comes just one day after Alibaba Group publicly committed to surpassing $100 billion in combined AI and cloud revenue over the next five years, a pledge made Thursday that sent the company's Hong Kong-listed shares surging more than six percent. Saturday's market data appears to validate the ambition behind that announcement, offering concrete evidence that the company's aggressive infrastructure buildout — spanning data centres in Singapore, Tokyo, Jakarta, and Mumbai — has translated into measurable commercial gains.
Analysts point to several converging factors behind the overtaking. Alibaba Cloud's deep integration with domestic Chinese enterprise clients, combined with its expanding footprint among Southeast Asian governments and financial institutions seeking data-sovereign alternatives to American providers, has steadily eroded AWS's long-held regional advantage. The company's recently launched Model Studio platform, which allows enterprises to fine-tune large language models on proprietary data without that data leaving local cloud zones, has proven particularly attractive to regulators in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.
'This is the moment the cloud industry in Asia-Pacific changes character,' said Benedict Evans, an independent technology strategist based in London. 'Alibaba isn't just competing on price anymore — they are competing on sovereignty, language capability, and AI tooling that is genuinely tailored to Asian enterprise workflows. AWS built the ocean; Alibaba is now building the rivers that feed it locally.'
Amazon responded Saturday afternoon with a statement from AWS Asia-Pacific Vice President Prasad Kalyanaraman, who contested the methodology of the Synergy figures and cited AWS's own internal metrics showing continued growth across the region. The company announced a fresh $2.1 billion commitment to expand its Singapore and Seoul infrastructure regions over the next 18 months, signalling that it intends to contest the new ranking aggressively. The rivalry is expected to dominate discussion at the upcoming Google Cloud Next and Microsoft Build conferences later this spring, as all four hyperscalers recalibrate their Asia-Pacific strategies in what is now the world's fastest-growing cloud market.