Driving China, January 30, 2024 News: According to foreign reports, the United States is trying to carry out a bigger blow on Chinese companies in the field of artificial intelligence. In addition to restrictions on hardware, the U.S. has also tightened regulations on software services.
Following the chip export control, the U.S. Department of Commerce began to control the export of cloud computing services. The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) requires U.S. IaaS companies to report information to the U.S. Department of Commerce if they use U.S. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to train large AI models, and those models have a certain level of parameters. This also applies to IaaS resellers.
Prior to this, the U.S. had already stated: "We can't let non-state actors, China, or people we don't want to give them access to our cloud services, train their models." Alan Estevez, the U.S. Department of Commerce's undersecretary of industry and security, has also said that the U.S. is evaluating imposing restrictions to prevent China from accessing U.S. cloud computing services.
If this decision is made, it will be part of a broader initiative to regulate technology resources, thereby inhibiting the advancement of Chinese AI applications.
According to the latest data released by market research firm Gartner, the global computing infrastructure services (IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service) market reached $120.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 29.9 percent from $92.8 billion in 20217%。In terms of the market share of related vendors, AWS and Microsoft Azure, two US cloud service vendors, account for 40% and 21% respectively5% market share. Among them, AWS revenue in 2022 exceeded $48.1 billion, while Microsoft Azure revenue reached 258$600 million.
Although China's Alibaba Cloud ranks third in the world, its revenue is only 92$800 million, significantly behind Microsoft Azure. Google Cloud ranked fourth, with a revenue of 90 in 2022700 million US dollars, with a market share of 75%。HUAWEI CLOUD ranked fifth, with a revenue of 52 in 2022$500 million, with a market share of 44%。