Alibaba is expanding its global cloud infrastructure, planning to establish new data centre regions in Europe as the Chinese technology company pushes to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence.
At its annual conference, Alibaba said it will establish its first cloud regions in Finland, the Netherlands and Turkey. The company also plans to expand its existing data centre footprint in Germany, France, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Hong Kong over the next 12 months.
Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu said the company expects demand for computing power to rise sharply as AI systems become more capable. He said machine thinking currently represents less than 3% of all human thinking capacity and suggested that machine intelligence could eventually reach 1,000 times human capacity.
To support that growth, Alibaba aims to increase the total capacity of its global data centres to more than 20 gigawatts by 2032. The company said the expansion will significantly increase Alibaba Cloud’s worldwide computing capacity and help support the industry’s rapidly growing AI workloads.
Alibaba is also expanding its AI ambitions through its Qwen family of models, which have become some of the most widely downloaded AI models worldwide. Wu said the company plans to develop much larger models with between five trillion and 10 trillion parameters, potentially making them several times larger than the biggest Chinese AI models currently available.
The combination of new data centres and larger AI models highlights Alibaba’s broader push to strengthen its position in the global cloud and artificial intelligence market.
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Alibaba Plans New European Data Centres as Qwen AI Ambitions Grow
