Baidu and Huawei tighten grip on China’s GPU cloud as chipmakers chase IPOs

Baidu and Huawei Technologies collectively accounted for more than 70 per cent of China’s market for cloud services built on home-grown graphics processing units (GPUs) in the first half of 2025, as home-grown artificial intelligence chips gain traction amid rising demand for computing power and a wave of public listing plans.\nThe figures, published in a Frost & Sullivan report released on Sunday, defined “GPU cloud” providers as companies that controlled the full chip-to-cloud value chain – from proprietary AI chips to computing clusters and cloud services.\nBaidu held a 40.4 per cent share, followed by Huawei with 30.1 per cent, the report said.\nThe findings reflect a broader shift among China’s leading AI chip developers – including Baidu, Huawei and Alibaba Group Holding – as they move beyond individual chip design to build full-stack hardware and software capabilities, in a bid to rival Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem and meet surging demand for AI training and inference. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.\n“Through systematic innovation, they are integrating thousands or tens of thousands of self-developed chips into a single, massive virtual computing resource pool,” the report said.\nFrost & Sullivan cautioned that China’s domestic GPU market still faced constraints including “hardware performance, software ecosystems, system integration and commercial operations”, meaning only a limited number of vendors had reached large-scale deployment so far.\nHowever, the domestic GPUs would move from being “strategic backups” to “core pillars” for the country’s AI industry over the next three to five years, the report said, adding that these chips were now demonstrating competitive cost-to-performance ratios over general-purpose chips in real-world workloads.\nBaidu’s lead was underpinned by the integration of its AI computing platform Baige with GPUs developed by its chip unit Kunlunxin, which shipped nearly 70,000 units in 2024, according to market research firm IDC.\n\nKunlunxin was founded in 2012 as an internal unit of Baidu before becoming increasingly independent over the years.\nIn its latest bid to expand market share, Kunlunxin unveiled two new AI accelerators last November. Baidu said the M100 would significantly improve inference efficiency for mixture-of-experts models, while the M300 was designed to train super-large multimodal models with trillions of parameters.\nThe report comes as domestic AI chip designers – from Baidu to Moore Threads Technology and Biren Technology – are driven by Beijing’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency and soaring demand for computing power.\nBaidu joined that wave last week, saying it had confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO of Kunlunxin, while noting the size and structure of the offering had yet to be finalised.\nBiren, a Shanghai-based GPU maker, began trading in Hong Kong last Friday after raising HK$5.58 billion (US$720 million). Its debut followed strong recent listings by peers including Moore Threads – dubbed “China’s Nvidia” – and MetaX Integrated Circuits in Shanghai last month.\nEnflame, another Shanghai-based rival to Biren, also completed its IPO tutoring process last week, moving closer to a listing on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-style Star Market.\n