Alibaba to open new data centres, unveils most powerful AI model
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced plans on Wednesday to open its first data centres in Brazil, France and the Netherlands as it accelerates its global artificial intelligence strategy.
The company will also add new facilities in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Dubai over the coming year, expanding its existing network of 91 availability zones across 29 regions, Alibaba said in a statement, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.
The move underscores the company’s push to make AI and cloud computing a core business priority alongside e-commerce. Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged 380 billion yuan ($53.4 billion) in AI-related infrastructure over three years. CEO Eddie Wu said at the company’s annual Apsara Conference that spending would increase further, though he did not give details.
“The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,” Wu said.
At the conference, Alibaba also unveiled its most advanced large language model to date — Qwen3-Max, containing more than 1 trillion parameters. The model is designed with particular strength in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, allowing it to operate with fewer human prompts than standard chatbots.
According to Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren, Qwen3-Max outperformed rivals such as Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 in certain third-party benchmarks, including Tau2-Bench.
Other launches included Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal AI system aimed at immersive applications in virtual and augmented reality, such as smart glasses and intelligent vehicle cockpits.
Alibaba also announced a partnership with Nvidia to co-develop physical AI capabilities, including data synthesis and processing, model training, reinforcement learning for simulations, and model validation.
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