Are we in the middle of a geopolitical cloud shift: West vs the East?

I understand this topic might be somewhat controversial, but let’s dive into the wild world of geopolitics and cloud providers. The clear leaders on each side are USA with AWS, Azure, and GCP & China with their tech titans Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei Cloud and Baidu.

If we look at the Gartner quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Service we can see that the leaders are clearly on the USA side:

Is that expected to change in the very short term? I don’t think so. Right now, most Western companies are only considering Eastern cloud providers for disaster recovery sites or as sources of "extended inexpensive capacity" for certain non-critical workloads. For example, Santander is using Huawei as disaster recovery solution for their credit services, while certain tests and processes at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the PSA Group also utilize Huawei Cloud. Similar scenarios are likely to happen with other Eastern providers. A different question is… what will happen in the mid-long term?

Clearly AWS, Azure, GCP are the ones which dominate the innovation in cloud services, they push the boundaries, and they provide the coolest services in a SaaS model. Also, privacy is very important for them, they follow (largely) the US/EU privacy regulatory laws, and they are the current leaders of AI.

On the other side, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei Cloud and Baidu provide a different perspective, focusing more on raw infrastructure, performance, and cost. They’re tight with the China government, working hand in hand to drive tech forward. So basically, it’s all about collaboration and making moves on a national scale, and not competing too hard between them.

These companies are also doing considerable efforts to enhance their self-reliance, as the USA is evidently attempting to impede their progress. For example, the US trade sanctions prevent Nvidia from exporting its advanced GPUs to China. In response, the Chinese government is pushing for alternatives by 2027, although viable alternatives are still lacking: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3260571/beijing-push-subsidies-local-firms-buy-china-made-chips-shore-citys-computing-infrastructure .?

Perhaps even internal competition within the US could inadvertently aid them, as Nvidia's rivals advocate for the elimination of CUDA, a key component of Nvidia's dominance in training AI models. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/intel-ceo-attacks-nvidia-on-ai-the-entire-industry-is-motivated-to-eliminate-the-cuda-market

On the server processor front, the response is already there, and it is the ARM server chip Yitian 710 created by Alibaba which is clearly competitive: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/arm_cloud_server_database_performance/

As always, I believe it's crucial from a technical standpoint to have awareness of potential "contenders" among technologies/providers you are more accustomed to. One of them is Huawei Cloud and if you are interested, they provide free courses https://edu.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/courses/ which could give you a good start to understand what they are offering nowadays. For each course, there is also a PDF document available for download if you prefer reading instead of watching the videos.

They also offer free packages so you can test their services for free: https://activity.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/free_packages/index.html

In my perspective, Huawei seems to be using a strategy of mirroring AWS, probably aimed at simplifying the migration from AWS to Huawei Cloud. This similarity is evident in the console interface, service naming conventions, and service sizes, which are similar to the ones in AWS.

In terms of pricing, pay-as-you-go Huawei's services are comparable to the pay-as-you-go models of AWS, Azure, and GCP. If cost is the critical factor, Alibaba Cloud may present a more attractive option, especially considering its aggressive start this year in the price war (https://techwireasia.com/03/2024/chinese-cloud-companies-on-pricing-war-as-alibaba-slashes-prices/). It's likely that they will target Western workloads, especially those not constrained by data sovereignty regulations in Western regions.

In summary, the current geopolitical conflicts between different parts of the world are also affecting the cloud computing providers. Western cloud providers focus on being innovative and following privacy rules, while Eastern ones prioritize having strong infrastructure and being cost-effective. For companies that have no data sovereign limitations, they have a limited budget and they are looking for cloud alternatives for basic services (compute, networking, storage…) it will be worth to take a look to the East and check if they match better their needs. As part of the industry, it will be important for our mid-long term future to keep an eye on new providers, and for that it is a good idea to start looking into educational offerings and trial packages offered by Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, and so on.