Alibaba Cloud, the cloud unit of Alibaba Group, has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, marking its sixth consecutive year in the Leaders category.
Gartner, a research and consulting firm, defines the cloud database management systems market as software products that store and manage data and are mainly delivered as platform as a service in the cloud. Vendors were assessed based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
Alibaba Cloud was cited for its cloud-native database capabilities, including serverless support across its proprietary database products and the compute, memory, and storage architecture used by PolarDB. The company said its data and artificial intelligence (AI) platform covers infrastructure, cloud platforms, databases, multimodal data management, AI engineering, and large language models (LLMs), allowing customers to build and run applications using components developed within the same ecosystem.
“We are accelerating toward the open integration and convergence of data and AI. In the era of Agentic AI, Alibaba Cloud Database ApsaraDB is evolving from a cloud-native data foundation to an ‘AI-ready’ multimodal data foundation, enhancing cloud-native capabilities, multimodal data management, and deeper AI-model integration,” said Dr. Feifei Li, president of Database Products and president of International Business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Gartner said in its report “Innovation Insight: Database Management Systems for Enterprise AI Agents” that spending on database management systems with built-in generative AI features is expected to triple by 2028. The firm noted that modern databases are increasingly used to capture and manage data needed for AI agents and model training.
Alibaba Cloud said its database products are used by organizations in sectors such as finance, internet services, media, automotive, retail, and AI-focused applications.
Chinese electric vehicle maker Li Auto uses Alibaba Cloud’s Lindorm multimodal database and Tair in-memory database to support the memory system of its intelligent cockpit. Tair is used for real-time processing and fast data retrieval, while Lindorm manages large volumes of different data types, including text, vectors, time-series, and spatial data. Alibaba Cloud said the system reaches recall accuracy of up to 99.5% with an average query time of 2 milliseconds.
Global insurer Manulife migrated the legacy data system for its Hong Kong operations to Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB. The company said the move maintained business operations while lowering migration and maintenance costs. PolarDB also supports Manulife’s multi-cloud setup with cross–availability zone and cross-cloud disaster recovery, as well as automatic scaling to handle changes in system demand.
In the healthcare sector, AstraZeneca China worked with Alibaba Cloud to develop an adverse event reporting tool to help reviewers identify relevant medical literature and prepare reports on drug safety issues. The system uses Alibaba Cloud’s AnalyticDB vector engine and integrates AstraZeneca’s medical data with Alibaba Cloud’s large language model tools. Alibaba Cloud said the platform increased reporting efficiency and improved accuracy.
Last month, Alibaba Cloud was also recognized as an Emerging Leader in four Gartner “Innovation Guide for Generative AI” reports released in November 2025, covering specialized cloud infrastructure, model providers, AI engineering, and knowledge management applications.