Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, recently announced its latest strategic plans to launch its first data centers in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with additional data centers to be added in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai in the coming year. Revealed at the company’s annual flagship technology conference, Apsara Conference 2025, the strategic expansion will also include the setup of new regional service centers in Indonesia and Germany to provide round-the-clock, multilingual customer support. Alibaba Cloud currently operates 91 availability zones in 29 regions globally.
Dr. Feifei Li, president of international business and senior vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, said, “AI is revolutionizing not only technology, but also the very foundation of how enterprises deliver business value and drive growth. Our strategic expansion of global infrastructure is designed to cater to the accelerating demand from forward-thinking customers. Alibaba Cloud stands at the forefront of AI innovation, co-evolving with our customers with full-stack AI and cloud solutions that support businesses anytime and anywhere. We are here to help partners and customers design, launch, and scale groundbreaking AI agents and applications, fueling the next generation of digital innovation and unlocking unprecedented value in the global marketplace.”
Supporting AI startups through the AI Catalyst Program
To further cultivate a vibrant technology ecosystem, Alibaba Cloud has launched the AI Catalyst Program, designed to support global AI companies to grow and scale. Selected companies will receive support from industry experts, access to AI products and tools, and go-to-market resources, including up to two billion free tokens on Model Studio, Alibaba Cloud’s one-stop generative AI development platform, and up to USD 120,000 in cloud credits.
Fueling worldwide AI innovation with full-stack technologies
Global companies are collaborating with Alibaba Cloud to push the boundaries of AI applications across industries including sports, automotive, biopharmaceuticals, marketing, and technology. Alibaba Cloud’s Platform for AI (PAI) announced the integration of the full suite of the NVIDIA Physical AI software stack, marking a milestone in the Physical AI domain. The initiative provides developers with a comprehensive, cloud-native platform to accelerate advancements in humanoid robotics and Physical AI solutions—underscoring Alibaba Cloud’s commitment to driving innovation in AI infrastructure and developer enablement.
Driving AI adoption in sports technology
In partnership with the International Skating Union (ISU) and ThinkSport, an innovation platform founded by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Alibaba Cloud unveiled the Sports Data Hack Challenge, an AI hackathon targeting the European market from October to December 2025. The program aims to engage Europe’s sports innovation ecosystem—startups, developers, academia, and industry leaders—to accelerate the adoption of AI and cloud in sports, build product prototypes that address real business challenges, and help transition winning concepts into commercial projects.
Enhancing medical safety with AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca China uses Alibaba Cloud’s LLM Qwen and Model Studio: Exclusive solution to build an adverse event reporting tool in China. This tool helps human reviewers in pharmaceutical companies identify relevant literature and generate detailed reports for adverse drug events, a crucial step in ensuring drug safety. AstraZeneca also harnesses Alibaba Cloud’s AI technologies to create an enterprise intelligent agent and AI-powered chatbot designed to enhance organizational efficiency.
Trained on a vast number of medical publications and fine-tuned with a customized annotated dataset, Alibaba Cloud helped AstraZeneca build a proprietary vertical model in the medical field with deep domain insight. The model can identify key safety information from literature and craft summaries with an estimated 95% accuracy, improving process efficiency by 300% compared to human analysts.
“Working closely with Alibaba Cloud, we managed to harness the benefits of the Qwen LLM and Model Studio: Exclusive, which vastly improved the efficiency of generating adverse event reports from huge amounts of medical literature. We’re proud to have pioneered this innovation in the industry and expect to explore more AI-based innovations with Alibaba Cloud,” said Xin Zhong, head of commercial IT, AstraZeneca China.
Strengthening cybersecurity for Shiseido
Shiseido, the global beauty and cosmetics retailer, has deepened its strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud to strengthen its digital infrastructure and operational security in China. Using Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud Threat Detection and Response (CTDR) platform, Shiseido leverages AI to intelligently analyze security alerts in real time. CTDR aggregates fragmented alerts into comprehensive security events, reconstructs complex attack chains, and identifies malicious actors, helping Shiseido detect and respond to cyber threats with unprecedented speed and accuracy while optimizing operational costs.
Alibaba Cloud’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service also provides 24/7 expert-led threat hunting, incident investigation, and rapid response, ensuring uninterrupted business continuity and resilience.
“Security is not just a technical requirement but a strategic imperative for our growth in China,” said Jerry Lin, CITO of Shiseido China & Travel Retail. “Partnering with Alibaba Cloud gives us the confidence to scale our digital transformation securely. Their AI-driven threat detection and expert services allow us to focus on delivering exceptional beauty experiences to our customers, knowing our cloud infrastructure is protected by advanced security measures.”
Revolutionizing content creation in Japan
GladCube, a leading provider of digital marketing services, has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to co-develop advanced AI solutions tailored for Japan’s digital marketing sector. Using Alibaba Cloud’s secure, scalable infrastructure and world-class AI technologies, GladCube aims to accelerate content development cycles while delivering measurable value to clients across industries.
Integrating Alibaba’s visual generation model, Wan, into GladCube’s vertical video transformation platform, “Dra Vis” enables rapid, high-quality video production, boosting both efficiency and creativity. Additionally, GladCube will launch “AvaTwin,” Wan-enabled AI avatar services that combine digital avatars with AI-generated narration, ideal for corporate communications such as earnings announcements, shareholder meetings, and recruitment campaigns.
Hiroki Kaneshima, president and CEO of GladCube, said, “We have long pursued creative excellence and operational efficiency by harnessing generative AI. Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud represents a major leap forward that will revolutionize creative content production and reshape the future of digital marketing in Japan.”
Advancing Japanese AI models with FLUX
FLUX, a Tokyo-based AI startup, has developed FLUX-Japanese-Qwen, a state-of-the-art large language model with 32 billion parameters. It delivers exceptional performance across Japanese language benchmarks, particularly excelling in fundamental analysis, summarization, and code generation, due to its robust foundation in Japanese reasoning and linguistic understanding.
A key breakthrough is the unique “Pinpoint-tuning” methodology, which targets only neural circuits responsible for Japanese language processing, preserving the model’s core reasoning capabilities. In collaboration with Alibaba Tongyi Lab, FLUX used this method to create its first industry-specialized model for the financial sector—empowering professionals with context-aware, reliable AI responses to accelerate adoption in finance.
Empowering enterprise-scale AI innovation
Turbo AI, a leading technology service provider, harnesses Alibaba Cloud’s AI infrastructure to deliver integrated solutions tailored to regional clients’ needs across the entire AI lifecycle—from model R&D to real-world application.
“By leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s resilient, secure infrastructure and intelligent resource scheduling, Turbo AI achieves dynamic configuration and elastic scaling of computing resources. This empowers us to enhance operational efficiency and optimize clients’ cost performance for AI workloads,” said Yuan Lu, head of big data at Turbo AI.
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