Alibaba intends to accelerate growth in strategic markets including Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas
Chinese giant Alibaba Cloud is moving ahead with its ambitious global expansion strategy, reaffirming plans to invest CNY380 billion ($52.7 billion) in building out its cloud infrastructure at a global scale.
Speaking at a recent corporate gathering, Alibaba Cloud’s CEO Eddie Wu emphasized the company’s goal of developing a “unified global cloud network”, enabling Chinese enterprises to access consistent AI infrastructure both domestically and internationally.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, Alibaba intends to accelerate growth in strategic markets including Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. The company currently operates 87 availability zones across 29 regions, with recent additions including a new region in Mexico and a second data center in Thailand.
These plans, first unveiled in February, have taken on renewed urgency following escalating U.S.-China tensions around access to AI hardware. The U.S. has restricted the export of advanced chips to China, prompting chipmakers like Nvidia to release downgraded products such as the H20 GPUs, which were tailored for the Chinese market.
However, in April 2025, the U.S. imposed even stricter limitations, banning the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China. Nvidia has said the move will cost the company around $5.5 billion in inventory-related charges and cause it to forgo approximately $15 billion in potential revenue, according to previous reports.
Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s chairman, previously expressed skepticism about the current wave of data center investments by U.S. hyperscalers, saying in February: “I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble.” He added: “I start to get worried when people are building data centers on spec… There are a number of people coming up, funds coming out, to raise billions or millions of capital.”
Alibaba’s latest earnings report showed strong financial performance, with Alibaba Cloud reporting a 13% year-on-year revenue increase, reaching CNY31.7 billion for the December quarter. The unit has recorded triple-digit AI-related product revenue growth for six consecutive quarters, making it the fastest-growing segment within the company over the past three years, according to the report.
The report also highlighted that a recent research note from Morgan Stanley indicated that Alibaba Cloud revenue could double over the next three years, potentially reaching CNY240 billion by 2028.
At end-January, Alibaba Group launched an upgraded version of its Qwen 2.5 AI model, claiming it outperforms models from DeepSeek, OpenAI and Meta. “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms… almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said on its WeChat account.
The launch followed DeepSeek’s disruptive entry into the market, marked by the January 10 debut of its AI assistant powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model and the January 20 release of its open-source R1 model. DeepSeek is a chatbot created by the Chinese AI company DeepSeek.
