Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, plans to open data centres in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months as it accelerates its international expansion and seeks to attract more enterprise customers with its integrated artificial intelligence capabilities.
The first of the new facilities is scheduled to open in the Netherlands in October, while the company will also expand existing data centre capacity in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong. Li Feifei, Alibaba Cloud’s chief technology officer and president of international business, announced the plans at the company’s Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, which runs through Thursday.
“We are expanding our global cloud footprint to bring computing resources closer to customers and partners,” Li said, adding that businesses were increasingly moving artificial intelligence from experimental projects into real-world deployment.
Alibaba Cloud currently operates 107 availability zones across 31 regions, according to the company. Gartner ranked it the world’s fourth-largest infrastructure-as-a-service provider by revenue in 2025, behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google, while ranking it the largest provider in the Asia-Pacific region, where it held a 22.5 per cent market share.
The international expansion comes as Alibaba increases investment in AI and cloud computing. Revenue from its AI and Cloud Computing Services business, which combines Alibaba Cloud with its chip-design arm T-Head, rose 45 per cent year on year to 48.4 billion yuan (US$7.2 billion) in the three months ending June 30. Li said annual recurring revenue from model and application services, including model-as-a-service offerings, had reached 20 billion yuan, compared with 16 billion yuan in August.
The company also announced partnerships with Panasonic Digital, Unity China, Indonesian logistics company Lion Parcel, Malaysia’s Loomi Entertainment and business software provider Shake as part of its overseas expansion.
Alibaba Cloud unveiled three AI products aimed at international customers. Smart Studio allows businesses to build and sell model-as-a-service platforms under their own brands, while Smart Fusion combines models for individual tasks and, according to Alibaba, can reduce token spending by about half. Smart Video can generate videos of up to one hour in more than 20 languages.
The announcements followed a broader push by Alibaba to develop and market what it describes as a full AI stack. The group said its Qwen 4 model was in training and that future Qwen 5 models could scale to as many as 10 trillion parameters. It also unveiled the Zhenwu V900 AI processor, which is scheduled for commercial release in the first quarter of 2027, and set a target of operating more than 20 gigawatts of global data centre capacity by 2032.
Neil Shah, a vice-president at Counterpoint Research, said Alibaba was developing “an impressive vertically integrated AI play”, with its Qwen models optimised through a stack extending from chips to software. He cautioned, however, that pursuing greater independence could slow the company in the near to medium term, while matching Western competitors in efficient “tokenomics” remained difficult.
