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Alibaba Cloud launches new regions in Turkey, Finland, and the Netherlands; expands existing footprint in Malaysia, Germany, and UAE.

Alibaba's geographic expansion increases local AI compute availability, competing with AWS/Azure/GCP in EMEA and Southeast Asia.
Trade pressSlicast · September 29, 2026 at 16:05 UTC · Global · Source: Data Center Dynamics
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Alibaba Cloud plans to establish new cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland, and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, while expanding its data center footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France, and Hong Kong.

"As Alibaba Cloud has advanced from AI-native infrastructure to an agent-native cloud architecture, AI is also moving rapidly from experimentation to real-world deployment, creating demand for both scalable infrastructure and more accessible AI capabilities," said Dr. Feifei Li, CTO and president of international business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. "We are expanding our global cloud footprint to bring computing resources closer to customers and partners, while continuing to evolve our AI technologies to help enterprises deploy models, optimize multi-model workloads, and create new AI-powered applications. At the same time, our growing ecosystem of customers and partners demonstrates how these capabilities can translate into tangible business value across industries and markets. We are committed to working closely with our global ecosystem to make AI more scalable, practical, and accessible for businesses."

The company has been rapidly expanding its international footprint. In September 2025, it announced plans to expand with new regions in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, as well as expanding capacity in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai. Many of these expansions have since been completed.

Alibaba operated 91 availability zones across 29 regions a year ago. As of now, the company operates 107 availability zones across 31 regions globally.

The expansion is part of Alibaba's commitment to invest $52.7 billion by February 2028 to expand its cloud business. Recent reports suggest this figure could expand to as much as $69 billion, though this has not been officially confirmed.

CEO Eddie Wu has stated the company needs its data center capacity to reach ten times that which it operated in 2022, and said earlier this month that Alibaba plans to operate 20GW of cloud capacity by 2032.

Last month, the company raised $10.2 billion in a Hong Kong share sale.

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Alibaba Cloud launches new regions in Turkey,… · Slicast