- Qoder accounted for 47.6% of market revenue in 2025, outpacing the combined share of the next four competitors
- China’s AI coding market is forecast to nearly triple this year as enterprises accelerate adoption
Alibaba’s AI coding assistant Qoder captured 47.6% of China’s AI programming market by revenue in 2025, exceeding the combined share of the next four competitors, according to a report released by research firm IDC on July 16.
The China AI Programming Market Share, 2025 report estimated the market at 399 million yuan ($56 million) last year and forecast it would nearly triple to 1.173 billion yuan by the end of 2026.
Zhipu AI’s CodeGeeX ranked second with an 11.5% share, followed by SenseTime’s Raccoon (10.5%), Tencent’s CodeBuddy (6.9%) and Baidu’s Comate (6.0%).
IDC said AI coding is evolving beyond code generation into end-to-end software productivity platforms that support the entire development lifecycle, including requirements analysis, coding, testing and deployment.
Increasing adoption
The trend mirrors global adoption. According to Gartner, the enterprise AI coding market surpassed $10 billion in annualized revenue by April 2026, and more than 70% of enterprise software engineers are expected to rely on AI coding agents for day-to-day development by 2028.
Alibaba said Qoder has attracted more than 5 million users worldwide and serves hundreds of thousands of enterprises, including China FAW, CITIC Securities and AsiaInfo.
The platform uses a proprietary Harness architecture that consolidates coding standards, historical decisions and team-specific knowledge into a unified knowledge engine, allowing AI to generate code with organizational context.
Alibaba said internal testing showed the system improved code acceptance rates by 11% while reducing token consumption by 40%.
AI coding as the first major application
AI-assisted software development has become one of the fastest-growing commercial applications of large language models because code quality can be measured objectively through compilation and testing.
Global AI leaders including OpenAI and Anthropic have made coding assistants a strategic priority with products such as Codex and Claude Code, while China’s leading AI companies are also competing aggressively for developers and enterprise customers.
IDC expects China’s AI coding market to nearly triple in 2026, suggesting the current competition is largely about securing developer ecosystems and enterprise customers before the market enters a period of rapid expansion.
Why it matters for global readers
Alibaba’s nearly 48% market share suggests China’s AI coding market has already become highly concentrated, in contrast with overseas markets where multiple vendors are competing more evenly.
The company’s emphasis on embedding enterprise knowledge into software development also reflects a broader shift in AI coding—from competing primarily on model performance to competing on workflow integration and enterprise productivity.
As Chinese foundation models continue to climb international software engineering benchmarks, the country’s AI coding ecosystem is becoming increasingly relevant to global developers and enterprise buyers.
