Alibaba Cloud announced on Wednesday that it's expanding its presence in Southeast Asia with new data centres in Malaysia and the Philippines as part of a broader push in the region that includes new infrastructure investments, a new AI competency centre and cloud and AI technology upgrades.
At its global summit event in Singapore, Alibaba Cloud launched its third data centre in Malaysia, and revealed that it plans to launch its second data centre in the Philippines in October this year.
Selina Yuan, president of international business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, didn’t provide details on the new data centres in Malaysia and the Philippines in terms of financial investment or capacity. However, she did say that the new facilities build on earlier infrastructure investments in Thailand, Mexico and South Korea, announced in the first half of this year.
Yuan said those investments will ensure that Alibaba Cloud can meet the rising global demand for secure, resilient and scalable cloud services, particularly as AI adoption accelerates across industries.
Alibaba Cloud also launched its first AI Global Competency Center (AIGCC) in Singapore, which it says is designed to support over 5,000 businesses of all sizes and 100,000 developers. The centre offers access to advanced AI models and powerful computing resources to accelerate experimentation and deployment.
The AIGCC will also introduce over ten AI agents across industry sectors such as finance, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, retail and energy to demonstrate AI’s potential across different verticals.
Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud said it will partner with more than 120 universities and institutions globally, with the goal of training 100,000 AI professionals every year.
Alibaba Cloud also said it has upgraded its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) products and introduced new AI tools to create new offerings to international customers.
For example, its real-time data streaming service, Alibaba Cloud Data Transmission Service (DTS), now offers a "One Channel For AI" capability to streamline multimodal data preparation. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud’s Platform for AI (PAI) has enhanced its high-performance AI inference capabilities to better support complex models such as Mixture of Experts (MoE) and large-scale deployments.
Alibaba Cloud also said that its ninth-generation Enterprise Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance will be available across additional global markets starting this month, including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the UK.
Alibaba Cloud’s “Energy Expert’ sustainability platform also launched an ESG Reporting solution powered by Alibaba’s proprietary large language model (LLM) Qwen to automatically generate ESG reports and disclosures.
