China’s cloud computing market continued explosive growth in 2018, according to a report, as tech giants gear up to develop platforms that allow people to access and store information using off-site servers.

The country’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public cloud market grew 86.1% year-on-year to $4.65 billion, according to data released Wednesday by the research firm IDC. The global market expanded 45%. In 2017, China’s IaaS public cloud market increased 72% year-on-year.

IaaS, one of three cloud popular service models, provides storage and networking power for corporate clients to build their own applications. The two others, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service, are more like layers on top of IaaS and provide servers and applications built for company clients.

China’s IaaS market scale is expected to grow faster than that of the rest of the world over the next five years, said Zhuge Lan, industry analyst at IDC. The domestic market now accounts for 12.9% of the global market, up from 10.1% the year before.

Cloud service is seen as the next battleground for Chinese tech titans. E-commerce giant Alibaba tapped the market in 2009 as one of the earliest players in China. Latecomers include social media giant Tencent Holding Ltd., telecom operator China Telecom and software group Kingsoft Corp. Ltd.

In September, Tencent announced a plan to revamp its business structure, creating a new division devoted to cloud computing and data services for corporate customers.

Related: Battle for the Cloud