Chinese hyperscalers Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei are pursuing agentic AI, developing systems capable of executing complex tasks autonomously and interacting with software, data, and services without human instruction.

Alibaba’s open-source strategy

Alibaba focuses on the Qwen family of language models, offering open-source licenses and multilingual capabilities. These models are the basis for AI services and agent platforms offered on Alibaba Cloud. The company has made its agent development tools and vector database services public, allowing anyone to adapt the tools to build autonomous systems.

Qwen is designed as a platform for specific solutions for finance, logistics, and customer support. The Qwen App, based on these models, has reached a large user base, creating links between autonomous tasks and Alibaba's commerce and payments ecosystem.

Alibaba's open-source portfolio includes Qwen-Agent, a framework to encourage third-party development of autonomous systems. Tencent has released Youtu-Agent, a similar open-source framework.

Tencent, and Huawei’s Pangu: Industry-specific AI

Huawei combines model development, infrastructure, and industry-specific agent frameworks to attract users to its global market. Its Huawei Cloud division has developed a 'supernode' architecture for enterprise agentic AI workloads, supporting large cognitive models and workflow orchestration required by agentic AI. AI agents are integrated into the base models of the Pangu family, which includes hardware stacks optimized for telecommunications, utilities, creative, and industrial applications.

Tencent Cloud offers a suite of "scenario-based AI" tools and SaaS applications accessible to businesses outside of China.

Availability in Western markets

Alibaba Cloud operates international data centers and markets AI services to European and Asian customers, positioning itself as a competitor to AWS and Azure. Huawei also markets cloud and AI infrastructure internationally, focusing on telecommunications and regulated industries. However, adoption by Western businesses remains limited due to geopolitical concerns, data governance restrictions, and differences in business ecosystems. Furthermore, limited access to Western GPUs imposes hardware constraints, pushing for the use of domestically produced processors or the localization of workloads in foreign data centers to secure advanced hardware.

The Qwen models are accessible to developers through standard model hubs and APIs with open licenses, allowing Western companies to experiment regardless of cloud provider choice.

Conclusion

Chinese hyperscalers are defining a distinct trajectory for agentic AI, combining language models with frameworks and infrastructure designed for autonomous operation in commercial contexts. Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei aim to integrate these systems into enterprise pipelines and consumer ecosystems, offering tools capable of operating with a degree of autonomy.

These offerings are accessible in Western markets, but have not yet achieved the same level of enterprise penetration in Europe and the United States. To find more common uses of Chinese-flavored agentic AI, we need to look to the Middle and Far East, South America, and Africa, where Chinese influence is stronger.

For those evaluating on-premise deployments, there are trade-offs to consider. AI-RADAR offers analytical frameworks on /llm-onpremise to evaluate these aspects.