Corporate leaders within the A.I. ecosystem have been racing to capture A.I. cloudshare—and to become the most trusted provider of A.I. on remote servers.

Enterprise customers are likely to stick with their initial vendor, because the more data that a machine learning system has access to, the better decisions it will learn to make over time. For that reason, the race is on.

In the West, the field is led by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, followed by companies including Apple, IBM, Salesforce, SAP and Oracle.

In Asian markets, Alibaba and Baidu dominate the A.I. cloud, although in January of 2020 telecom equipment and smartphone maker Huawei announced a management change to focus on what it calls a “full-stake cloud platform.”

It’s a $250 billion industry and quickly growing. NYU Stern School of Business professor Arun Sundararajan says it best: “The prize will be to become the operating system of the next era of tech.”