Alibaba to add data centres in Europe, Middle East amid AI push, US-China tech race - The Business Times

ALIBABA Group is accelerating its data centre expansion in Europe and the Middle East, propelling its 20 gigawatt (GW) global infrastructure buildout during China’s escalating competition in artificial intelligence chips and models with the US.

The Chinese e-commerce leader will set up its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, Alibaba executive Li Feifei said at the company’s flagship Apsara conference in Hangzhou on Wednesday (Sep 23).

The company will also expand its data centre footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong, a move that will boost its ability to provide localised cloud and AI services.

Alibaba’s growth push means it is increasingly going head-to-head with Western competitors such as Amazon and Alphabet in regions beyond Asia.

Its global ambition aligns with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision to share the country’s advances with the world, at a time when US President Donald Trump’s administration wants other countries to prioritise the use of US technology offerings and avoid alternatives from China.

Alibaba’s global cloud network spans from Japan to South-east Asia and the Middle East. In recent months, it opened new facilities in Brazil and France, aiming to bring generative AI services to local enterprises.

“We are committed to working closely with our global ecosystem to make AI more scalable, practical and accessible for businesses,” said Li, who serves as chief technology officer and president of international business for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

Alibaba kickstarted its annual tech summit in Hangzhou earlier this week, demonstrating its full-stack AI capabilities – just days before Xi embarks on his first state visit to the US in over a decade, with AI at the top of his agenda.

The company unveiled a new line of AI chips it claims are China’s most powerful and built for frontier-model training. It also said it is training new foundation models with five trillion to 10 trillion parameters, far larger than existing open-weight models.

Underpinning this hardware-and-software push is a plan to build a 20 GW global data centre network by 2032 – which Citigroup estimates could drive more than US$160 billion in external cloud revenue.

Alibaba is among China’s most aggressive spenders on digital infrastructure, which it views as fundamental to achieving artificial general intelligence.

The company outlined a US$53 billion, three-year AI investment plan in 2025 and has since indicated that capital spending will continue to rise. BLOOMBERG

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