Alibaba Cloud, the digital backbone of Alibaba Group, revealed its plan to launch its first cloud region in Mexico and to establish additional data centers in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea over the next three years.
Alibaba Cloud aims to enhance its cloud and AI product suite for global customers and foster AI talent development through collaborations with universities and local partners.
Speaking at the Alibaba Cloud Global Summit in Paris, Selina Yuan, president of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, emphasized the company’s commitment to equipping the next generation with essential AI skills through digital talent initiatives.
“With the rapidly rising demand for AI across industries, we are reinforcing our commitment to
expanding our AI infrastructure and enhancing our cloud capacities worldwide,” Yuan said.
International AI development
To support enterprises and developers in creating AI models and applications, Alibaba Cloud announced that its generative AI (GenAI) development platform, Model Studio, will soon be available internationally via its Availability Zones in Singapore.
Model Studio will provide access to Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen large language model family, which includes both closed-source and open-source models with multimodal capabilities. These models, ranging from 0.5 billion to several hundred billion parameters, will help customers develop custom GenAI applications. New model fine-tuning and inferencing tools and services will be introduced later this year, promoting more sophisticated AI tasks with improved cost efficiency.
Salesforce CRM platform
Alibaba Cloud has deepened its collaboration with software company SAP to offer a comprehensive enterprise solution for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Asia. This solution integrates SAP Business One with Alibaba Cloud’s scalable infrastructure, providing SMEs with a powerful enterprise resource planning (ERP) system without significant initial IT investments. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s compute nest technology, the new solution allows seamless integration of SAP Business One services, facilitating rapid deployment and operational efficiency.
Recognizing the growing interest from multinational companies in China, Alibaba Cloud is developing a Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud training course tailored for these enterprises. The course will focus on using and mastering the Salesforce CRM platform, incorporating localized features and products supported by Alibaba Cloud.
Available since the end of 2023, Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud has enabled multinational brands to address the unique needs of the Chinese market while maintaining consistency with global Salesforce products. The training program includes offline sessions to teach essential skills to administrators, aiming to equip over 10,000 participants with proficiency in the Salesforce platform by the end of 2025.