BEIJING -- China continued to be the leading growth market for cloud infrastructure services expenditure in the first quarter of 2022, according to a report by the technology market research firm Canalys.

Such expenditure on the Chinese mainland hit $7.3 billion in the first three months, up 21 percent from a year ago, said Canalys.

The country's spending accounted for 13 percent of the global total, the report said.

The market leaders in China remained unchanged in the first quarter, with the top four cloud service vendors being Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Baidu AI Cloud, according to the report.

Benefiting from China's expansion of cloud use, the four providers accounted for 79 percent of total expenditure in China, said Canalys.