IDC Forecasts China's AI Data Infrastructure Market to Reach $73.8B by 2030

At the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Summit, IDC research manager Wang Nan shared new findings on AI data infrastructure, forecasting that China's AI data infrastructure market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 37.7% from 2025 to 2030, reaching $73.8 billion by 2030 and potentially $154.8 billion by 2035.

IDC divides the market into three categories: AI data platforms, AI data intelligence, and AI data services. AI data platforms handle unified management and processing of multimodal data; AI data intelligence uses AI to improve data governance, analysis, and usage efficiency; AI data services extend from traditional data annotation to knowledge base operations, evaluation data, and synthetic data.

According to Wang, as large models' general capabilities improve, the bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption is shifting from model capability to data capability. IDC forecasts China's data generation will grow from 76.05 ZB in 2025 to 146.65 ZB by 2030. Meanwhile, unstructured data and vector data are increasingly becoming part of enterprise data assets, requiring traditional architectures to evolve toward unified, real-time, secure AI-ready data infrastructure. AI data intelligence is expected to be the fastest-growing segment, with a CAGR of 48.2% from 2025 to 2030.

Wang noted that future competition will hinge on building a closed loop spanning data management, data intelligence, data services, and agent consumption. He highlighted a small-model-plus-multimodal-data-foundation approach as a key path to efficient and controlled AI deployment. This trend is also pushing domestic database vendors such as OceanBase to expand from supporting core business data to becoming the data foundation for enterprise-wide data and AI agents.