Hangzhou, China – Alibaba Cloud plans to establish its first cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, while expanding its data centre footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong.
Announced at the 2026 Apsara Conference, the expansion forms part of the company’s wider strategy to increase global computing capacity and support enterprise adoption of AI. Alibaba Cloud currently operates 107 availability zones across 31 regions.
The company also unveiled three AI solutions for building and deploying applications, alongside updates to its cloud infrastructure and collaborations with businesses across manufacturing, gaming, logistics, entertainment and commerce.
“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, optimise 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,” Li continued.
New tools for enterprise AI
Alibaba Cloud introduced three solutions designed to help businesses develop and scale AI applications.
Smart Studio enables businesses to establish branded Model-as-a-Service platforms, including tools for packaging, pricing, metering and billing model APIs. Alibaba said its inference architecture can deliver up to 505% higher throughput than standard open-source frameworks running on the same hardware.
Smart Fusion provides a unified model API and enables multiple models to collaborate on tasks. The company said its approach can reduce token spending by around 50%.
Smart Video is an AI video agent aimed at short-drama studios and advertisers. It can generate videos of up to one hour from a prompt, supports natural-language editing and works with multiple video models, including Wan. The platform also supports more than 20 languages.
Cloud and AI adoption across industries
Alibaba Cloud highlighted customer deployments involving its Qwen models, Model Studio and data services.
Panasonic Digital (Shanghai) is using Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian (Model Studio), Qwen models and data management tools to build AI agents for manufacturing, supply chain and corporate operations. Alibaba said the deployment has reduced documentation time by 80% and increased contract review efficiency tenfold.
“We are very grateful for our strategic collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, which has been instrumental in accelerating Panasonic Digital’s enterprise-wide AI transformation,” said Yueming Li, Head of GenAI Innovation & Workforce, Panasonic Digital (Shanghai).
“By seamlessly integrating their world-class AI models and robust data infrastructure into our operations, we have successfully moved beyond isolated IT optimisations to build a highly scalable, secure, and unified intelligence platform,” Li continued.
Unity China has integrated Qwen and other foundation models through Model Studio into Tuanjie AI-Codely, its AI-native engineering platform for game development. The platform supports workflows including code comprehension, editing and debugging.
“Game development is becoming increasingly complex, and our goal with Tuanjie AI is to remove technical friction so creators can focus on innovation and gameplay,” said Junbo Zhang, CEO of Unity China.
“Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio and the Qwen model family provide the performance, flexibility, and low latency our developers require. By integrating these advanced AI capabilities directly into the development pipeline, we are enabling studios to debug, iterate, and bring ambitious game projects to life faster than ever before,” Zhang continued.
Indonesian logistics provider Lion Parcel is using Qwen-VL-Plus through Model Studio to automate finance and document processing.
“Alibaba Cloud’s OCR solution powered by Qwen helped us accelerate Document Order processing in Finance. It’s improving accuracy while saving both time and operational costs,” said Probosetyo Krishna, Head of IT at Lion Parcel.
Malaysia-based Loomi Entertainment Group has integrated Alibaba’s Wan and HappyHorse visual generation models into its Imaginary cinematic AI engine. The companies are also running creator training and exploring the use of Wan in micro-drama production.
“Alibaba Cloud’s advanced AI models give creators new ways to turn ideas into engaging content more efficiently. Through this partnership, we look forward to bringing AIGC capabilities to more creators in Malaysia and the wider region, while exploring new possibilities for AI-powered content production,” said Ivan Tan, CTO of Loomi Entertainment Group.
SHAKE is using Alibaba Cloud computing resources and Qwen models to develop AI-based agentic resource planning services for small and medium-sized businesses. Its services will also be offered through the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.
“By fusing SHAKE’s pioneer expertise in Agentic Resource Planning with Alibaba Cloud’s world-class compute infrastructure and cutting-edge Qwen models, we are unlocking unprecedented value for our customers,” said Sean Hinton, CEO of SHAKE.
“This collaboration serves as a powerful catalyst for our regional growth across APAC and marks a monumental milestone in our journey. Together, we are accelerating our vision to empower SMBs with the intelligent tools they need to thrive and scale in the agentic era,” Hinton continued.
Alibaba Cloud also announced a separate agreement with AnyMind Group to integrate Qwen into AnyLive, its AI-powered live commerce platform. The integration is intended to improve customer intent analysis and real-time responses across Asian languages.
“The quality of a live commerce experience depends on how well brands understand customers and respond to their needs in the moment,” said Akinori Kubo, Managing Director, Global E-Commerce, AnyMind Group.
“Adding Qwen to AnyLive’s multi-model stack will strengthen intent analysis and response accuracy across Asian languages, helping brands create live rooms where customers feel understood and can make more informed purchase decisions,” Kubo continued.
