Alibaba Cloud has announced plans to expand its global infrastructure and launch new AI tools aimed at helping enterprises deploy AI applications more efficiently, unveiled at the 2026 Apsara Conference in Hangzhou.
Over the next 12 months, the company will open its first cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands, while expanding its data centre footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong. Alibaba Cloud says it now operates 107 availability zones across 31 regions worldwide.
New AI tools for enterprise deployment
The company launched three new AI products at the conference. Smart Studio helps businesses build their own Model-as-a-Service platforms, with an inference architecture Alibaba Cloud says delivers up to 505 per cent higher throughput than standard open-source frameworks on the same hardware. Smart Fusion combines multiple AI models behind a single API to cut token costs by around 50 per cent, while Smart Video is an AI video agent aimed at short-drama studios and advertisers, capable of producing videos up to an hour long from a single prompt.
“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 at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Southeast Asian customers building on Qwen
Several Southeast Asian companies are already using Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen models in production. Indonesian logistics firm Lion Parcel has deployed the Qwen-VL-Plus model to automate finance and document processing, cutting down on manual data transcription. Malaysia-based entertainment company Loomi Entertainment Group has integrated Alibaba’s Wan and HappyHorse visual generation models into its cinematic AI engine, Imaginary, and has run two AI-generated content hackathons that trained more than 100 local creators.
SHAKE, a Singapore-based agentic resource planning platform for small and medium-sized businesses, is building a proprietary model on Qwen to expand its services across APAC markets, with its offerings set to be listed on the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. Other partners named include Panasonic Digital, Unity China and AnyMind Group, which is integrating Qwen into its live commerce platform, AnyLive.
