Alibaba Cloud, the digital and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has announced a major expansion across Southeast Asia while celebrating a decade of operations in Singapore. The milestone was marked at its Global Summit held in Singapore on 2 July 2025, where the company unveiled new data centres, an AI Global Competency Center (AIGCC), and a series of new cloud and AI offerings designed to accelerate enterprise innovation.
Strengthening regional infrastructure
To meet growing demand for AI and cloud services in Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud has launched its third data centre in Malaysia and plans to open a second data centre in the Philippines by October 2025. These additions follow earlier expansions in Thailand, Mexico and South Korea, and reflect the company’s commitment to building a resilient global cloud network.
The new infrastructure will support a wide range of use cases, including artificial intelligence, data storage and computing, helping businesses and developers scale their operations more effectively. “Over the past decade, Singapore has been both an innovation centre and a gateway to the region’s digital economy,” said Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “We reaffirm our commitment to empowering businesses of all sizes while driving sustainable digital transformation in Singapore for years to come.”
Advancing enterprise AI through a global hub
Alibaba Cloud has established its first AI Global Competency Center in Singapore, with the aim of supporting over 5,000 businesses and 100,000 developers. The centre offers advanced AI tools, computing resources, and support through an AI Innovation Lab. It will also introduce more than 10 AI agents tailored to key industries such as finance, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, retail and energy.
In addition to fostering innovation, the AIGCC aims to grow global AI talent. The company will partner with over 120 universities and institutions to train 100,000 professionals annually.
Launch of upgraded products and sustainability initiatives
Alibaba Cloud has introduced several upgraded services to enhance global AI development. Its Data Transmission Service (DTS) now features “One Channel For AI”, a tool that simplifies the process of turning multimodal data into vector databases for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. The update is designed to lower the barriers to deploying large language model (LLM)-powered applications.
The Platform for AI (PAI) has also been enhanced to support large-scale and complex models. The new Expert Parallel (EP) feature in PAI’s Elastic Algorithm Service boosts efficiency in inference tasks. Qwen3 235B, one of the company’s LLMs, now achieves over 15,000 tokens per second with an average latency below 50 milliseconds.
Other improvements include faster instance startups and scaling via the new Model Weights Service. This enables near-instant deployment of models like Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B, with tests showing up to 97.6% improvement in scaling time.
The company’s ninth-generation Intel-based Enterprise ECS instance is also being rolled out to more markets, including Japan, South Korea, the UK and UAE. This instance delivers 20% better computing performance and up to 50% performance gains in high-performance workloads.
Alibaba Cloud’s sustainability platform, Energy Expert, now includes an AI-powered ESG Reporting tool that aligns with global standards such as ISSB, GRI and SASB. It aims to simplify ESG disclosures while reducing operational costs through guided structuring and automation.
Global study highlights need for Green AI
A study commissioned by Alibaba and conducted by Forrester Consulting in partnership with the Alibaba-NTU Global e-Sustainability CorpLab (ANGEL) found that while awareness of green AI is rising, most organisations are in the early stages of adoption. Of the 464 business and IT leaders surveyed, 84% view green AI as important, yet 69% remain at the beginner stage.
Key barriers include lack of sustainable hardware materials (80%), difficulty in managing data centre energy use (73%), and skills gaps in defining and implementing green AI strategies. Recommendations include using renewable energy, deploying edge computing, and building lighter code applications. The study also called for greater collaboration between public and private sectors to establish standards.
Growing customer adoption of Qwen and cloud services
Several international clients are already using Alibaba Cloud’s technologies to power AI and digital transformation. Indonesia’s GoTo Group has migrated its core business intelligence platform to Alibaba Cloud’s MaxCompute, handling tens of petabytes of data with zero downtime. GoTo Financial has also adopted cloud-native databases for its lending systems.
Singapore-based VisionTech is using Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure and large language model Qwen to deliver multilingual AI bots across Southeast Asia, cutting infrastructure costs by over 25%. “Qwen’s strong performance in handling multilingual conversational inputs and real-time translation gives us a distinct edge,” said Lim Hui Jie, CEO of VisionTech.
In Japan, FLUX is collaborating with Alibaba Cloud to introduce Qwen-based solutions to local enterprises. In the Middle East, a new partnership with Al-Futtaim will see the 90-year-old business group tap Alibaba Cloud’s AI capabilities to support its innovation and expansion across 18 countries.
