Alibaba has revealed plans to launch new data centres in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with further facilities planned in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai.
The expansion will grow its existing network of 91 facilities across 29 regions and places the Chinese company head-to-head with established giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged ¥380 billion ($53.4 billion) over three years to build AI infrastructure. At its annual Apsara Conference, Chief Executive Eddie Wu signalled the spending will not stop there. “The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,” he told participants.
The highlight of the event was the unveiling of Qwen3-Max, Alibaba’s largest artificial intelligence model so far. Built with more than 1 trillion parameters, it has been designed to handle code generation and operate as an autonomous agent, systems that can pursue goals with limited human direction.
According to Alibaba Cloud’s Chief Technology Officer, Zhou Jingren, the model displayed particular strength in tasks that typically require continuous prompts. Independent benchmarks such as Tau2-Bench showed it surpassed rival offerings including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in some areas.
Alibaba also presented Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal system developed for immersive applications ranging from smart glasses to intelligent cockpits. This is a drive into consumer-facing AI experiences, particularly in retail, automotive, and wearable technology.
In a further step, the company revealed a partnership with Nvidia to advance physical AI capabilities. Their collaboration will focus on model training, data synthesis, reinforcement learning, and validation for real-world use cases, areas where Nvidia dominates the global chip market.
Alibaba, once known primarily for e-commerce, is now placing AI and cloud services at the centre of its global operations, strengthening a competition that stretches across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
