Alibaba to open new data centres; unveils most powerful AI model

The expansion comes as the company positions AI, which includes cloud, as a core business priority alongside its traditional e-commerce operations

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba said on Wednesday (Sep 24) it plans to open its first data centres in Brazil, France and Netherlands as it accelerates its global strategy for artificial intelligence.

The company will also add facilities in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai over the coming year, expanding its current network of 91 areas of operation across 29 regions, Alibaba said in a statement.

The expansion comes as Alibaba positions AI, which includes cloud, as a core business priority alongside its traditional e-commerce operations.

Earlier this year, the company announced plans to invest 380 billion yuan (S$68.6 billion) in AI-related infrastructure over the next three years as competition to develop advanced AI capabilities intensifies among Chinese tech firms.

At the company’s annual Apsara Conference on Wednesday, CEO Eddie Wu said Alibaba would increase spending further without specifying amounts.

“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,” Wu said.

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Alibaba also unveiled on Wednesday its largest ever artificial intelligence language model, the Qwen3-Max.

The model contains more than one trillion parameters, or variables that determine how an AI system processes information, and shows particular strength in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer at Alibaba Cloud, said at the conference.

Autonomous agent capabilities mean the AI system requires fewer human prompts than a chatbot like ChatGPT, and can make decisions and take action independently towards a goal set by the human user.

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Alibaba cited third-party benchmarks, such as Tau2-Bench, saying the model outperformed rival products including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in certain metrics.

The company released the Qwen three model in April.

Additional AI products unveiled Wednesday included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal, immersive system useful for virtual and artificial reality applications such as smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.

Alibaba also unveiled a partnership with Nvidia to develop physical AI capabilities covering data synthesis and processing, model training, environmental simulation reinforcement learning and model validation testing. REUTERS