"Alibaba Cloud yesterday announced its first datacenters in Brazil, France, and The Netherlands, plus expansion of its presence in five other countries outside China. The cloudy offshoot of giant e-tailer Alibaba already operates 91 availability zones in 29 regions, 14 of which are in China - a market in which it enjoys dominant market share thanks to both its solid offerings and the fact that global rivals AWS, Azure, and Google have limited presences in the Middle Kingdom."
"Alibaba Cloud's past expansion saw it focus on markets that enjoy close trade relationships with China - especially in Southeast Asia - a strategy it chose because Chinese companies wanted to use the same cloud wherever they operate and because the large Chinese diaspora around the region is open to working with the Middle Kingdom cloud. Moving into Brazil suggests Alibaba Cloud is reusing its strategy, as the South American country is an increasingly important trade partner for China."
"The company is also expanding its datacenter footprint in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai. Dr. Feifei Li, Alibaba Cloud's president of international business, said the motive for this round of expansion is bringing the company's AI to the world. Alibaba Cloud has produced its own Qwen models and yesterday announced Qwen3-Max which it claims outperforms Chat GPT 5 and cracked third place on model-measuring service LMArena's leaderboards."
Alibaba Cloud launched datacenters in Brazil, France, and The Netherlands while expanding into five other countries outside China. The business operates 91 availability zones across 29 regions, including 14 regions in China where it holds dominant market share. Prior expansion targeted markets with close trade ties to China, particularly Southeast Asia, to serve Chinese companies and diaspora customers. Additional footprints expanded in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai. Leadership cited delivering proprietary AI globally, highlighting Qwen models and the Qwen3-Max claim. Previous market attempts included closures in Australia and India, where co-location facilities were used instead of owned datacenters.
Read at Theregister
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]