Alibaba Cloud announced significant expansion plans for Southeast Asia, unveiling a new data centre in Malaysia and plans for a second facility in the Philippines slated for launch in October 2025. These developments are part of Alibaba Cloud’s broader regional growth strategy, which also includes infrastructure investments in Thailand, Mexico, and South Korea earlier this year.
Speaking at Alibaba Cloud’s global summit in Singapore, Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, emphasized that these investments will address rising global demand for secure, scalable cloud services amid accelerating AI adoption across industries.
As part of its AI focus, Alibaba Cloud launched its first AI Global Competency Center (AIGCC) in Singapore, aiming to support over 5,000 businesses and 100,000 developers. The centre offers advanced AI models and computing resources to expedite AI experimentation and deployment. It will introduce more than ten AI agents across key sectors such as finance, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, retail, and energy, showcasing AI’s transformative potential.
Alibaba Cloud also announced partnerships with over 120 universities and institutions worldwide to train 100,000 AI professionals annually, bolstering the global AI talent pipeline.
On the product front, Alibaba Cloud upgraded its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings and introduced new AI tools. Notably, its real-time data streaming service, Data Transmission Service (DTS), now features a “One Channel For AI” capability to streamline multimodal data preparation. The Platform for AI (PAI) has enhanced high-performance AI inference support, enabling complex model deployment like Mixture of Experts (MoE).
Additionally, Alibaba Cloud’s ninth-generation Enterprise Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance will be rolled out across more global markets starting July 2025, including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, UAE, Germany, and the UK.
On the sustainability front, Alibaba Cloud introduced an ESG Reporting solution within its “Energy Expert” platform, powered by its proprietary large language model (LLM) Qwen. This solution automates ESG report generation and disclosures, supporting enterprises in meeting environmental, social, and governance requirements.
