CDN choices for China

Akamai has given customers a firm decommission date of June 30, 2026 for its mainland‑China CDN nodes. (datacenterdynamics.com)) Akamai warned that any remaining China content requests will be automatically served from neighboring countries unless customers complete a migration to mainland partners, and the company named Tencent Cloud and Wangsu (ChinaNetCenter) as partner migration paths. (yahoo.com)) Akamai said delivery made up roughly one‑third of its revenue—about $329 million—in Q2 2024, framing the China exit as part of a strategic shift toward cybersecurity and cloud offerings. (datacenterdynamics.com)) Cloudflare runs a dedicated “China Network” model that routes traffic through strategic on‑the‑ground partners while offering DDoS mitigation, a web application firewall and Zero Trust features for traffic touching mainland PoPs. (cloudflare.com)) AWS operates separate China regions—China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet and China (Ningxia) operated by NWCD—which require distinct account credentials and local onboarding procedures for services hosted inside mainland China. (aws.amazon.com)) Mainland hosting still requires an ICP filing or license under MIIT rules, and websites hosted on servers inside mainland China cannot legally go live without that registration. (appinchina.co)) Domestic providers remain dominant: Alibaba Cloud has been cited by IDC as the #1 edge public cloud provider in China for multiple consecutive reporting periods, while Wangsu (ChinaNetCenter) is a long‑established, publicly listed Chinese CDN operator now positioned as an Akamai partner for customer migrations. (alibabacloud.com)) Region‑specific benchmarking tools such as CDNPerf and Cloudflare Radar publish China‑focused latency and QoS metrics firms use to compare providers, and global round‑trip times between antipodal sites can reach roughly 300 ms—the practical reason onshore PoPs materially reduce user latency. (cdnperf.com))