Challenger: Alibaba Cloud

One of the largest cloud players throughout Asia/Pacific, Alibaba Cloud offers a complete set of cloud AI developer services spanning language, vision and autoML services.

The China-based provider packages its services in a number of ways to suit professional and citizen developers. Alibaba Cloud is a subsidiary of Alibaba, a publicly traded company with 48 global offices.

The company ranks fifth for execution and among the middle of the pack in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Strength: Its AI marketplace offers more than 1,600 models. Alibaba Cloud offers flexible pricing: either pay-as-you-go or periodic charges. It also provides some free APIs for developers.

Weakness: About 99 percent of its cloud AI developer services clients are based in China. Although Alibaba Cloud provides comprehensive customer support, it has fewer cloud AI developer services partners than its major competitors.