SINGAPORE -
Media OutReach Newswire
- 2 July 2025 - Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence
backbone of Alibaba Group, today marked a decade of operations in
Singapore and the 10th anniversary of the establishment of its
international headquarters in the country. To commemorate this
milestone, it unveiled new infrastructure investments, a new AI
competency center, advanced cloud and AI technologies, and global
research findings on green AI adoption at its Global Summit,
underscoring its ongoing commitment to advancing AI innovation.
Held in Singapore, the Alibaba Cloud Global Summit gathered over 500
leaders from business, technology, and the public sector worldwide to
explore the future of AI, cloud computing, and sustainable digital
transformation. The event also reaffirmed Singapore's position as a
strategic hub and international headquarters for Alibaba Cloud's
long-term growth in Asia-Pacific and beyond.
Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said,
"Over the past decade, Singapore has been both an innovation center and a
gateway to the region's digital economy. As we celebrate this important
milestone, we reaffirm our commitment to empowering businesses of all
sizes and verticals while advancing cutting-edge AI innovations and
driving sustainable digital transformation in Singapore for years to
come. Together with our partners and customers, we look forward to
shaping Singapore's future as a global leader in AI and cloud
innovation."
New Data Centers in Malaysia and the Philippines
To meet the growing demand for cloud and AI services across Southeast
Asia, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of its third data center in
Malaysia on July 1, 2025. It also plans to open its second data center
in the Philippines in October 2025.
Those expansions build on earlier infrastructure investments in
Thailand, Mexico, and South Korea, announced in the first half of 2025.
This growing network ensures that Alibaba Cloud can meet the rising
global demand for secure, resilient and scalable cloud services,
empowering businesses, developers, and organizations to innovate and
scale with confidence as AI adoption accelerates across industries.
Launch of AI Global Competency Center to Power Enterprise Innovation
During the event, Alibaba Cloud launched its first AI Global Competency Center (AIGCC) in Singapore. The move
aims
to accelerate AI adoption by supporting enterprises of all sizes, from
small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to large-scale organizations, while
also addressing the growing global demand for AI talent.
The center is designed to support over 5,000 businesses and 100,000
developers, offering access to advanced AI models and powerful computing
resources to accelerate experimentation and deployment. Developers and
businesses will benefit from the AI Innovation Lab, which offers token
credits, curated datasets and personalized support tailored to
real-world scenarios and industry needs.
As a collaborative innovation hub, the AIGCC aims to bring together more
than 1,000 companies and startups to co-develop next-generation AI
solutions, fostering an ecosystem of applied innovation. The center will
also introduce over 10 AI agents across key industries - including
finance, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, retail and energy -
demonstrating AI's potential across different verticals.
To build a robust AI talent pipeline, Alibaba Cloud will partner with
more than 120 universities and institutions globally, with the goal of
training 100,000 AI professionals annually.
New Cloud Products for Global AI Development
Alibaba Cloud announced new offerings to international customers by
upgrading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service
(PaaS) products and introducing new AI tools.
Alibaba Cloud Data Transmission Service
(DTS), a real-time data streaming service, introduced a new "One
Channel For AI" capability to streamline multimodal data preparation.
This feature establishes an end-to-end pipeline that automatically
converts both unstructured and structured data—including documents,
images, tables, audio, and video—into vector databases, enabling
developers to create real-time knowledge bases and create
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications with just few clicks.
By automating the vectorization workflow, the upgraded DTS lowers
technical barriers, enabling businesses to deploy LLM-powered
applications faster and more efficiently.
Alibaba Cloud's Platform for AI (PAI) has enhanced its
high-performance AI inference capabilities to better support complex
models like Mixture of Experts (MoE) and large-scale deployments with
two key improvements in its PAI-Elastic Algorithm Service (EAS). For MoE
architectures, PAI-EAS now features
Expert Parallel (EP), an advanced optimization that works with a
prefill-decode disaggregation framework to boost efficiency. This
combination significantly increases inference efficiency, enabling
higher throughput for LLMs while optimizing resource utilization. For
example, the EP distributed deployment for Qwen3 235B achieves a TPS
(Tokens Per Second) performance exceeding 15k, while maintaining an
average per-token latency of under 50 milliseconds.
PAI-EAS also tackles slow cold starts and inefficient scaling with its new
Model Weights Service, which dramatically reduces loading times.
This makes it possible to spin up instances in seconds, rather than
minutes. Tests with Qwen3-8B show 89.8% faster cold starts and 97.6%
quicker scaling, while Qwen3-32B achieves 91.4% faster cold starts and
near-instant scaling.
In response to customer demand, the company also revealed that its
9th Generation intel-based Enterprise Elastic Compute Service
(ECS) instance will be available across additional global markets
from July, including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the
Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the UK. Since its
launch in April, nearly 10,000 businesses have adopted the upgraded
instance, leveraging its industry-leading performance. This latest
generation delivers 20% greater computing efficiency compared to
previous iterations. By integrating elastic Remote Direct Memory Access
(eRDMA) technology for ultra-fast networking, it achieves up to 50%
performance gains in high-performance computing (HPC), search
recommendations, and Redis database workloads.
Alibaba Cloud's sustainability platform, Energy Expert, introduced a cutting-edge AI-driven
ESG Reporting solution,
empowering organizations to navigate the complexities of environmental,
social, and governance (ESG) disclosures with precision and ease.
Powered by Alibaba's proprietary AI model Qwen, the innovative solution
streamlines report generation through AI-powered tools - such as guided
structuring, automated content creation and actionable insights - while
enabling seamless collaboration via real-time task management and
progress tracking.
Designed to align with global standards— including the International
Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), Global Reporting Initiative
(GRI), and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)—the platform
ensures compliance, reduces operational costs, and strengthens audit
readiness through traceable data lineage and centralized record-keeping.
New Global Study Reveals Growing Awareness of Green AI and Adoption Challenges
Also unveiled at the Global Summit were findings from a global study on
the development and adoption of artificial intelligence systems that
minimize energy consumption and environmental impact, known as green AI.
The study was conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by
Alibaba in collaboration with Alibaba-NTU Global e-Sustainability
CorpLab (ANGEL). Surveying over 464 business and IT leaders worldwide,
including Singapore, the study reveals the growing recognition of the
importance of green AI, but also highlights a significant gap between
vision and execution.
The study found that while 84% of leaders who have implemented an AI
sustainability vision consider green AI to be important, 69% of
organizations globally are still at the beginner stage of AI adoption.
Many cited persistent technical challenges as key barriers to progress –
among them, the lack of sustainably sourced materials for AI hardware
(80%) and the difficulty of optimizing data center energy usage (73%).
Beyond the technical hurdles, the survey also revealed widespread
capability gaps. A significant number of decision-makers indicated they
lacked the knowledge to define a clear green AI strategy (74%), as well
as the skills needed to implement and operate it (76%).
Considering those challenges, the study recommends several key
strategies to drive wider adoption of Green AI, including powering data
centers with renewable energy, deploying edge computing with optimized
smaller models to reduce data center loads, and developing applications
with code that requires less computational power. It also highlights the
importance of increased collaboration between public and private
sectors on regulation and standards and leveraging open-source models to
minimize pre-training and energy consumption.
International Customers Leveraging Cloud and Qwen for AI Innovation
To help drive digital transformation and accelerate AI innovation
initiatives, an increasing number of international customers have
selected Alibaba Cloud as its digital solutions provider for its trusted
cloud computing capabilities and advanced AI technologies.
After successfully migrating GoTo Financial's infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud,
GoTo Group, the largest digital ecosystem in Indonesia, has now
migrated its core business intelligence data platform to Alibaba Cloud's
MaxCompute to boost operational agility and drive cost efficiency. With
MaxCompute's fully managed architecture and automation, Alibaba Cloud
delivered a seamless, six-month migration with tens of petabytes of data
across GoTo's complex system, achieving zero downtime and uninterrupted
business continuity for GoTo Group throughout the process.
William Xiong, Group Chief Technology Officer of GoTo Group, said
during the summit, "The migration to Alibaba Cloud's MaxCompute has
enhanced the scalability and resilience of our data platform. By
delivering cost efficiency, performance parity, and operational
continuity, this collaboration strengthens the technical foundation for
GoTo's ecosystem. This partnership positions us to drive innovation and
deliver transformative solutions for millions of users across the
ecosystem, while staying aligned with Indonesia's data sovereignty
goals."
To enhance data management efficiency, GoTo Financial has migrated its
lending workload to Alibaba Cloud's database solutions. By leveraging
cloud-native database PolarDB and in-memory database Tair, GoTo
Financial's lending systems now deliver high performance and ultra-low
latency, seamlessly supporting over 500 microservices.
Many customers have also leveraged Alibaba Cloud's flagship large
language model, Qwen, to deliver innovative solutions, thanks to its
robust multilingual capabilities. Qwen 3, the latest iteration of the
Qwen family, supports 119 languages and has demonstrated exceptional
performance in multilingual mathematical reasoning and translation,
particularly in Asian languages, according to public datasets.
VisionTech, a generative AI company focused on boosting sales,
enhancing customer experiences, and addressing manpower challenges in
Singapore, tapped into Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure and AI
technologies to fuel its business growth across Southeast Asia. With
Alibaba Cloud's services, including Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and a
strong regional presence, VisionTech reduced infrastructure costs by
over 25%, improved support turnaround times, and accelerated AI
deployment for enterprises and SMEs. VisionTech is also incorporating
Qwen, Alibaba's flagship large language model, as one of its core large
language models (LLMs) to power its solutions, enhancing its AI bots'
ability to seamlessly manage multilingual interactions.
"Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud allows us to deliver smarter,
scalable, and enterprise-ready AI solutions while maintaining
operational efficiency and customer satisfaction," said
Lim Hui Jie, CEO of VisionTech. "Qwen's strong performance in
handling multilingual conversational inputs and real-time translation
gives us a distinct edge over other LLMs, enabling us to fast-track
deployments and improve user engagement— whether it's English, Chinese,
Malay, or Japanese. By dynamically switching languages in real-time, our
AI bots create a seamless experience that resonates with users in
various markets, ensuring that our solutions feel native and culturally
aligned."
FLUX, a leading Japanese technology solution provider, partnered
with Alibaba Cloud to accelerate AI adoption in Japan. Through this
collaboration, FLUX will introduce Qwen—Alibaba's family of large
language models (LLMs)—in various sizes to Japanese enterprises,
enabling GenAI integration into their critical workflows. Additionally,
FLUX will leverage Qwen to develop FLUX LLM solution, a customized AI
solution designed to help Japanese businesses of all sizes optimize
operations and enhance service capabilities.
Alibaba Cloud and
Al-Futtaim, a Dubai-based, 90-year-old, privately held and
diversified business group - recognized as one of the region's most
progressive enterprises operating across 18 countries in the Middle
East, North Africa, and Asia - have signed a strategic Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU) to accelerate Al-Futtaim's digital transformation
and global innovation agenda.
Under the agreement, Al-Futtaim will access Alibaba Cloud's advanced AI
capabilities, including proprietary foundation models and open-source
frameworks to drive AI-powered innovation across its business units. The
collaboration will also enable Al-Futtaim to leverage Alibaba's global
cloud infrastructure, broad digital ecosystem, and industry expertise to
support its expansion into key international markets and scale
transformative outcomes across sectors.