Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has announced its plan to launch its first cloud region in Mexico, and to establish additional data centers in its key markets including Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea in the next three years.
The new investment to build new cloud and AI infrastructure across key international markets also aims to enhance the cloud and AI product suite for its worldwide customers, while enhancing global partnership and fostering AI talent development to nurture future digital expertise.
“With the rapidly rising demand for AI across industries, we are reinforcing our commitment to expanding our AI infrastructure and enhancing our cloud capacities worldwide,” said Selina Yuan, president of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, during the Alibaba Cloud Global Summit in Paris.
“Meanwhile, our digital talent initiatives, in collaboration with global universities and local partners in our key markets, will further equip the upcoming generation with the requisite AI skills.”
To enable enterprises and developers to develop AI models and applications, Alibaba Cloud’s premier generative AI development platform, Model Studio, will soon be available for international customers via its Availability Zones in Singapore.
Through Model Studio, customers can gain access to Alibaba Cloud’s large language model Qwen family – including both closed-source and open-source models, featuring multimodal capabilities with sizes that range from 0.5 billion to several hundred billion parameters — to facilitate the development of custom generative AI applications.
Additional model finetuning and inferencing tools and services will be available in the second half of the year, fostering the development of more sophisticated AI tasks with greater cost-efficiency.
Alibaba Cloud also announced it has deepened its collaboration with SAP to launch a one-stop enterprise solution for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Asia to reap the benefits of digital transformation with rapid deployment and on-demand expansion capabilities.
By combining the holistic business management capabilities of SAP Business One with Alibaba Cloud’s cloud infrastructure, the integrated cloud-based business management solution, is poised to provide SMEs in Asia with a powerful, scalable enterprise resource planning (ERP) system on the cloud without the need for substantial initial investment in IT infrastructure.
Given the increasing interest and demand from multinational companies operating in China, Alibaba Cloud is also developing a Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud training course in China.
The exclusive course is designed for multinational companies with a focus on using and mastering the Salesforce CRM platform, along with its integrated and localized features and products operating on and supported by Alibaba Cloud in China.
