BEIJING, July 11 (Xinhua) -- The market scale of artificial intelligence (AI) in China is expected to reach 71 billion yuan (10.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 2020, the Internet Society of China (ISC) said on Thursday.

The ISC report predicted that the market scale of AI in China will reach 50 billion yuan in 2019.

In 2018, the AI market in China hit 33.9 billion yuan, up 52.8 percent year on year, according to the report.

The global market share of China's AI industry expanded to 12.56 percent in 2018 from 9.41 percent in 2017.

As of the end of 2018, China had 3,341 AI enterprises, accounting for more than one-fifth of the world's total 15,916 AI firms.

The report said China's cloud computing, big data and Internet of Things markets grew to 90.7 billion yuan, 540.5 billion yuan and 1.2 trillion yuan, respectively, in 2018.