Alibaba Cloud is planning a big infrastructure push, hoping to meet the increasing need for data sovereignty with scalable, locally hosted AI compute.
The Chinese cloud giant is creating its first cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland, and the Netherlands, and is increasing its data center footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France, and Hong Kong.
By 2032, the company said it's aiming for a total global data center capacity of more than 20GW.
The announcements follow a commitment last year to invest around $52 billion in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over three years.
The expansion, announced at the 2026 Apsara Conference, will boost the firm's ability to provide localized cloud and AI services to customers across key markets.
Alibaba Cloud currently operates 107 availability zones in 31 regions around the world.
“As Alibaba Cloud has advanced from AI-native infrastructure to an Agent-Native Cloud architecture, AI is also moving rapidly from experimentation to real-world deployment, creating demand for both scalable infrastructure and more accessible AI capabilities,” said Dr Feifei Li, chief technology officer and president of international business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
“We are expanding our global cloud footprint to bring computing resources closer to customers and partners, while continuing to evolve our AI technologies to help enterprises deploy models, optimize multi-model workloads and create new AI-powered applications."
Alibaba Cloud ramps up AI features
The company has also launched three new AI solutions to help businesses build and scale production-grade applications.
Smart Studio is designed to help businesses quickly build dedicated Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms, with everything needed to package, price, meter, and bill model APIs under their own brand.
Boasting an “advanced inference architecture”, the firm said this will deliver up to five-times the throughput of standard open source frameworks on the same hardware.
Smart Fusion, meanwhile, is an intelligent engine designed to help users and businesses achieve state-of-the-art model performance at low cost through a unified standard model API.
This supports multi-model collaboration within one task, picking the best-suited available models to work together by analysing real-time dimensions. By abstracting multi-model deployment into a single endpoint, Alibaba said it can help reduce token spending by half.
New Qwen model and chips are coming
Elsewhere, the firm's next-generation model, Qwen 4, is currently in training, with the company also announcing its roadmap for the upcoming Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 model series, projected to scale up to 5 to 10 trillion parameters.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced the Zhenwu V900, its next-generation AI chip, which it said delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890 released earlier this year.
The processor has 216GB of memory and 1,200GB/s of inter-chip bandwidth, with support for data formats including FP8 and FP4. It's scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of next year.
FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Follow ITPro on Google News and add us as a preferred source to keep tabs on all our latest news, analysis, views, and reviews.
You can also follow ITPro on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and BlueSky.
UK tech salaries are rising, but there’s a growing rift
Australian prime minister says OpenAI took ‘way too long’ to reveal agents breached Medicare systems
