Recently, there has been an interesting phenomenon—although the total number of cloud computing instances is shrinking, the demand for AI chips is becoming more intense.

According to the latest data, the overall cloud computing market in December decreased by 2% month-on-month but increased by 10% year-on-year. At first glance, it seems quite stable, but a closer look reveals significant differentiation.

AWS is still steadily growing, with a 3% month-on-month increase. Google Cloud is a bit slower but also grew by 1% month-on-month. However, Microsoft Azure is a bit struggling, with a surprising 6% decline month-on-month. Interestingly, Alibaba Cloud saw a 30% year-on-year surge, although recently it has experienced some pullback month-on-month.

Cloud providers are gradually phasing out older computing instances, so demand for traditional servers has slightly declined. Computing processor instances decreased by 2% month-on-month, but this is not a big issue—still up 11% year-on-year, indicating overall resilience.

The real highlight is Intel's new generation Granite Rapids instances. Although Intel's overall instances decreased slightly by 3% month-on-month, the Granite Rapids platform surged by 12%, now reaching 1,933 instances. This shows a high acceptance of the new architecture.

Industry analysts believe that, in terms of short-term instance momentum, this wave of market activity is actually more favorable for Intel. The sustained strong demand for AI servers is driving orders across the entire chip industry. Behind this trend is a clear signal: cloud providers are accelerating infrastructure updates to meet the demands of the AI era.