Alibaba Group Holding Limited (Alibaba), a Chinese multinational technology company, will open its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, while expanding data center operations in Malaysia, Germany, the UAE, France and Hong Kong.
According to a company blog, the plans were announced at the 2026 Apsara Conference, where it also introduced three AI products which are Smart Studio for building Model-as-a-Service platforms, Smart Fusion for coordinating multiple AI models through a unified API, and Smart Video for generating videos of one hour from prompts.
“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, CTO and President of International Business, 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. At the same time, our growing ecosystem of customers and partners demonstrates how these capabilities can translate into tangible business value across industries and markets. We are committed to working closely with our global ecosystem to make AI more scalable, practical and accessible for businesses.”
Readers will recall that Alibaba recently unveiled the Zhenwu V900, a new data center GPU, as the company expands its AI chip and computing infrastructure. At the same time, Alibaba is expanding its AI model roadmap as its Qwen team is researching recursive self-improvement and plans to train a model with between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters, targeting more complex, longer-running tasks. Multimodal models are another key area of development as Alibaba Cloud currently operates 107 availability zones across 31 regions.