Alibaba Cloud is accelerating its push across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, coupling physical data-centre construction with the distribution of its open-weight Qwen artificial intelligence models. On 3 November 2026, Alibaba Group Chairman Joseph Tsai stated at the World Internet Conference that the company had released more than 470 open models under the Qwen family. The dual strategy is designed to address local data-residency requirements while drawing regional developers into Alibaba's computing infrastructure.
Expanding data centres in the Global South
At the Apsara Conference on 23 September 2026, Alibaba Cloud announced plans to establish its first cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland, and the Netherlands over the following twelve months, alongside capacity additions in Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. The announcement followed infrastructure completions across other emerging markets. In Latin America, the provider launched its first regional cloud hub in Querétaro, Mexico, in February 2025, followed by a two-centre region in São Paulo, Brazil, on 27 August 2026.
In Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud opened a new cloud region with two data centres in Johor, Malaysia, in June 2026, complementing existing facilities in Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand. In the Middle East, it opened a second Dubai data centre in October 2025 to operate alongside its Riyadh partner region. Expansion in Africa remains selective: in July 2025, Senegal signed an agreement to deploy Alibaba Cloud's private Apsara Stack to run core digital infrastructure for the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games and subsequent national administrative services.
Local partnerships and Qwen adoption
Open-weight Qwen models have gained traction among institutions and enterprises seeking customisation and on-premises deployment. AI Singapore built its regional foundational models, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4 and v4.5 (released in May 2026), upon Qwen architectures to improve comprehension across Southeast Asian languages. In enterprise operations, Malaysian electric-vehicle firm PRO-NET uses Alibaba's Model Studio to develop an internal chatbot, while Indonesian courier Lion Parcel deployed the Qwen-VL-Plus model in September 2026 for automated documentation. In the UAE, digital platform Wio Bank agreed in October 2025 to develop banking agents on local Dubai clusters. In August 2026 Alibaba said Qwen models had passed 3 billion downloads across all platforms and spawned more than 300,000 derivative models; Hugging Face's own report that month counted about 2 billion downloads on its hub in 2026 and some 151,000 Qwen-derived models.
However, commercial hurdles persist. Western hyperscalers maintain substantially larger capital budgets across Latin America and the Gulf. Geopolitical tensions also pose compliance questions for sovereign clients handling sensitive data on Chinese platforms. Furthermore, industry observers note that high open-source download volumes do not automatically translate into sustained, recurring cloud hosting revenue.
Why it matters
The coordinated expansion of physical infrastructure and open-weight models provides developing countries with practical alternatives to Western AI ecosystems, directly addressing data sovereignty and language inclusion. For Alibaba, grounding popular open models in local cloud regions helps convert developer mindshare into long-term enterprise revenue across emerging markets.
