HANGZHOU, CHINA - Media OutReach Newswire - 24 September 2025 - Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced its latest strategic plans to launch its first data centers in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with additional data centers to be added in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Dubai in the coming year. Revealed at the company's annual flagship technology conference Apsara Conference 2025, the strategic expansion will also see the set up of new regional service centers in Indonesia and Germany to provide round-the-clock, multi-language customer supports. Alibaba Cloud currently operates 91 availability zones in 29 regions globally.

Dr. Feifei Li, President of International Business and SVP of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, said "AI is revolutionizing not only technology, but also the very foundation of how enterprises deliver business value and drive growth. Our strategic expansion of global infrastructure is designed to cater for the accelerating demand from forward-thinking customers. Alibaba Cloud stands at the forefront of the AI innovation, co-evolving with our customers with full stack AI and cloud solutions that support businesses anytime and anywhere. We are here to help partners and customers to design, launch, and scale groundbreaking AI agents and applications, fueling the next generation of digital innovation and unlocking unprecedented value in the global marketplace."

To further cultivate a vibrant technology ecosystem, Alibaba Cloud has launched the AI Catalyst Program, designed to support global AI companies to grow and scale. Selected companies will receive support from industry experts, access to AI products and tools, and go-to-market resources, including up to 2 billion free tokens on Model Studio, Alibaba Cloud's one-stop generative AI development platform, and up to 120k USD cloud credits from Alibaba Cloud.

Fueling Worldwide Partners and Customers' AI Innovation with Full-Stack AI and Cloud Technologies

Global companies are collaborating with Alibaba Cloud to push the boundaries with AI. Innovative applications across industries including sports, automotive, biopharmaceutical, marketing, and technology have demonstrated the value of AI in driving innovation and growth.

Alibaba Cloud's Platform for AI (PAI) announced an integration of the full suite of the NVIDIA Physical AI software stack, marking a milestone collaboration in the Physical AI domain. The initiative provides developers with a comprehensive, cloud-native platform to accelerate advancements in humanoid robotics and Physical AI solutions. This collaboration underscores Alibaba Cloud's commitment to driving innovation in Physical AI, equipping developers with the tools and agility to rapidly advance breakthroughs in humanoid robotics.

In partnership with the International Skating Union (ISU) and ThinkSport, an innovation platform and center of excellence founded by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Alibaba Cloud unveiled Sports Data Hack Challenge, an AI Hackathon targeting European market running from October to December 2025. Building on Alibaba Cloud's trusted AI and cloud technologies, the program will engage Europe's sports innovation ecosystem—startups, developers, academia, and industry leaders—to accelerate the adoption of AI and cloud in sports, build product prototypes that address real business challenges, and help transition winning concepts into commercial projects.

AstraZeneca China uses Alibaba Cloud's LLM Qwen and Model Studio: Exclusive solution to build an adverse event reporting tool in China that can help human reviewers in pharmaceutical companies identify relevant literature and generate detailed reports for adverse drug events, a crucial step in ensuring drug safety. AstraZeneca also harnesses Alibaba Cloud's AI technologies to create an enterprise intelligent agent and AI-powered chatbot designed to enhance organizational efficiency in China.

Trained on a vast number of medical publications and scientific papers and finetuned with annotated customized dataset, Alibaba Cloud helped AstraZeneca build a proprietary vertical model in the medical field with a more profound insight of the domain. The model can identify key safety information from literature and crafts summaries with an estimated 95% accuracy and improved the whole process efficiency by 300% compared to human analysts.

"Working closely with Alibaba Cloud, we managed to harness the benefits of the Qwen LLM and Model Studio: Exclusive, which vastly improved the efficiency of generating adverse event reports from huge amounts of medical literature. We're proud that we have pioneered this innovation in the industry. We expect to explore more AI-based innovations with Alibaba Cloud," said Xin Zhong, Head of Commercial IT, AstraZeneca China.

Shiseido, the globally renowned beauty and cosmetics retailer, has deepened its strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud to strength its digital infrastructure and operational security in China. Taking advantage of Alibaba Cloud's cutting-edge Cloud Threat Detection and Response (CTDR) platform, Shiseido harnesses advanced AI to intelligently analyze security alerts in real time. CTDR aggregates fragmented alerts into comprehensive security events, reconstructs complex attack chains, and identifies malicious actors, helping Shiseido to detect and respond to cyber threats with unprecedented speed and accuracy, while optimizing operational costs. In addition, Alibaba Cloud's Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service provides Shiseido with 24/7 expert-led threat hunting, incident investigation, and rapid response, ensuring uninterrupted business continuity and resilience for the retailer.

"Security is not just a technical requirement but a strategic imperative for our growth in China," said Jerry LIN, CITO of Shiseido China & Travel Retail at Shiseido China. "Partnering with Alibaba Cloud gives us the confidence to scale our digital transformation securely. Their AI-driven threat detection and expert services allow us to focus on delivering exceptional beauty experiences to our customers, knowing our cloud infrastructure is protected by advanced security measures in the country."

GladCube, a leading provider of digital marketing services, has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to co-develop cutting-edge AI solutions tailored for Japan's digital marketing sector. Using Alibaba Cloud's secure, scalable infrastructure and its world-class AI technologies, GladCube aims to significantly accelerate content development cycles while delivering measurable value to clients across industries.

Integrating Alibaba's visual generation model, Wan, into GladCube's vertical video transformation platform, "Dra Vis" will enable rapid, high-quality video production, dramatically boosting both the efficiency and creative potential of marketing teams. Additionally, GladCube will launch "AvaTwin," Wan-enabled AI avatar services that seamlessly combines digital avatars with AI-generated narration, ideal for corporate communications in scenarios such as earnings announcements, shareholder meetings, and recruitment campaigns.

Hiroki Kaneshima, President & CEO of GladCube, commented: "We have long pursued the dual goals of creative excellence and operational efficiency in content development by harnessing generative AI. Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud represents a major leap forward, and we are confident it will revolutionize creative content production and reshape the future of digital marketing in Japan."

FLUX, a Tokyo-based AI startup, has developed "FLUX-Japanese-Qwen", a state-of-the-art Japanese large language model, which is a 32-billion-parameter, open-source model. It delivers exceptional performance across a broad spectrum of Japanese language benchmarks — particularly excelling in Fundamental Analysis, Summarization, and Code Generation — thanks to its robust foundation in Japanese knowledge, reasoning, and language.

A key technological breakthrough behind the model is the unique "Pinpoint-tuning" methodology. Rather than applying conventional fine-tuning across the entire model, which often degrades core reasoning and inference capabilities, the model identifies and targets only the neural circuits specifically responsible for Japanese language processing. This precision enables dramatic improvements in Japanese comprehension and generation while fully preserving the model's original capabilities. In collaboration with Alibaba Tongyi Lab, FLUX used this method to develop the "FLUX-Japanese-Qwen" and subsequently created its first industry-specialized model for the financial sector.

By applying Pinpoint-tuning to domain-specific Japanese datasets — including financial regulations, business practices, and industry development — this financial sector-specific model is designed to empower financial professionals with reliable, context-aware responses to industry-specific queries, accelerating AI adoption in the sector.

Turbo AI, a leading technology service provider, harnesses Alibaba Cloud's cutting-edge AI infrastructure to deliver integrated solutions tailored to regional clients' needs across the entire AI lifecycle—from model research and development to deployment and real-world application. These solutions address a broad spectrum of use cases, ranging from lightweight model operations to large-scale infrastructure management.

"By leveraging Alibaba Cloud's resilient, secure cloud infrastructure and intelligent resource scheduling, Turbo AI achieves dynamic configuration and elastic scaling of computing resources. This empowers us to significantly enhance operational efficiency and optimize our clients' cost performance of AI workloads," said Yuan LU, Big Data Head of Turbo AI.