Sealand: AI drives rapid growth and restructuring of cloud computing IaaS industry.

Sealand released a research report stating that AI has become the core engine driving the growth of the cloud computing industry. The high computing power demand generated by large model training/inference, and the widely spread AI applications stemming from this, are significantly lifting the ceiling of the cloud computing market. In order to seize the opportunity, major global cloud vendors are increasingly increasing their capital expenditure for high-performance infrastructure construction and simultaneously improving AI development toolchains and platform services to accelerate the scale landing in various industries. Based on the incremental space and profit prospects brought by AI, Sealand maintains a "recommended" rating for the computer industry. Sealand's main points are as follows: Cloud computing is moving towards intelligence, industry space reassessment IaaS is the IT infrastructure resource products provided by cloud service providers, including three categories: computing, storage, and network, together with PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), and other main products of cloud service providers. Cloud service providers are located in the middle of the industry chain, providing various core cloud service products; upstream supply includes chips and IT infrastructure equipment, including chips (such as CPU, GPU, ASIC, etc.), servers, storage devices, routers, switches, etc.; downstream covers applications and end-users, including enterprise users (financial, medical, manufacturing, etc.), individual users (cloud storage, online office), and developers. After going through stages such as resource cloudization (2006-2013), cloud native (2013-2020), and computing power ubiquity (2020-2023), the ChatGPT triggered a wave of large model training in 2023, which led the cloud computing industry into the intelligence stage, and AIIaaS has reconstructed the technical resources of computing, storage, and network. In terms of industry space, the global IaaS market is growing rapidly, according to iMedia Research, the domestic IaaS market is expected to reach nearly 800 billion yuan in 2029; and the current cloud computing market remains highly concentrated, with the top four giants competing for positions in the intelligent cloud. Global top cloud vendors: AI business high growth, driving increased capital expenditure The revenue growth of the top four global cloud vendors slowed down before 2022, as traditional cloud services entered a mature stage. However, with the large model technology/AI starting to scale in commercial applications at the end of 2022, the revenue growth of the top cloud vendors is stabilizing and rising, entering a new growth cycle. According to CCID CONSULTING and Changshi Capital, Microsoft's AI services accounted for 16 percentage points of growth in Azure in 2025Q2, and Azure AIFoundry processed 5 trillion tokens in the 2025 fiscal year, a more than 7-fold increase year-on-year; Alibaba Cloud's AI-related business has maintained triple-digit growth for eight consecutive quarters, becoming a core highlight. In the second quarter of 2025, the AI revenue of the top four global cloud vendors is growing rapidly, and orders are continually increasing. In the past three years, the top cloud vendors have continued to expand their capital expenditure scale, with investment focus shifting from traditional general data centers to intelligent computing centers and AI chips: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba have made significant investments in AI infrastructure, and have recently raised their capital expenditure plans for 2025 and beyond, firmly transitioning to AI. Outlook: Inference market becomes a new driving force, business opportunities shifting to the application layer. The technological direction of large models for iteration has shifted from enhancing inference, multimodal, agentization, and long-context, which trends in technological iteration will enhance the practicality and accuracy of AI in more complex and more productive key scenarios, accelerating the landing of AI applications, and shifting the focus of the large model industry development from training to inference. The "Matthew Effect" of the cloud industry is increasingly prominent, with core underlying resources such as data, computing power, and storage accelerating towards a few top manufacturers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and domestic Alibaba Cloud, forming a relatively solid pattern. At the same time, the value of cloud services is shifting from the infrastructure layer (IaaS) to the platform layer (PaaS) and model as a service layer (Maas) and even the SaaS layer, especially AI native applications and industry solutions have become new growth engines. Currently, top cloud vendors generally feel supply and demand tension, with clear acceleration of revenue growth looking forward; the industry believes that the current resonance between cloud vendors' capital expenditure and revenue acceleration has just begun as the new cycle of AI cloud may be just beginning. Risk Warning: Escalation of China-US tensions, downstream industry demand recovery below expectations, AI large model development below expectations, technological development below expectations, increased market competition, exchange rate fluctuation risks, and poor performance of related companies.