Alibaba Group is accelerating its overseas data centre expansion with plans to launch facilities in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months. The Chinese tech giant is targeting more than 20 gigawatts of global data centre capacity by 2032 as it competes with Amazon and Alphabet in markets beyond Asia.
Alibaba Cloud has launched Qwen AI Arena, a platform for testing AI agents in real business scenarios, while simultaneously introducing a $30 annual subscription for its AI office assistant to test consumer willingness to pay for AI services.
Alibaba Cloud has introduced CUBE 5.0, a modular data center architecture that reduces construction time for large-scale AI infrastructure from several months to 100 days while cutting costs by 10 percent. The announcement reflects intensifying competition among tech giants in AI infrastructure beyond just models and chips.
Alibaba led a $290 million funding round for ShengShu, a three-year-old Chinese startup developing AI models that aim to connect perception and action, moving beyond traditional large language models. ShengShu founder Zhu Jun stated the company aims to build models that are more general than LLMs.
