Alibaba Cloud, a prominent provider of AI and cloud infrastructure and part of Alibaba Group, unveiled an ambitious plan to expand its global infrastructure and introduce enhanced AI capabilities at the 2026 Apsara Conference.
This initiative aims to streamline how businesses create, deploy, and scale AI applications, with collaborative projects involving prominent global firms such as Panasonic Digital, Unity China, Lion Parcel, Loomi Entertainment Group, and SHAKE.
In the coming year, Alibaba Cloud plans to establish its first cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland, and the Netherlands, alongside expanding data centers in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France, and Hong Kong. This strategy is designed to bolster Alibaba Cloud's global computing capacity and enhance its ability to offer localized AI and cloud services. Currently, the company operates 107 availability zones across 31 global regions.
Dr. Feifei Li, Chief Technology Officer and President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, highlighted the shift from AI-native infrastructure to an Agent-Native Cloud architecture, emphasizing the escalating transition of AI from experimental phases to full-scale deployment.
Alibaba Cloud launched three AI solutions at the conference to assist international enterprises in building scalable AI applications. The Smart Studio product facilitates the creation of Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms. Smart Fusion optimizes model performance at a reduced cost through a unified model API, which lowers token spending significantly. Smart Video, designed for short-drama studios and advertisers, enables the automatic creation of videos, supporting over 20 languages.
Through collaborations with companies like Panasonic Digital, Unity China, and Lion Parcel, Alibaba Cloud is addressing diverse business needs in sectors such as gaming, logistics, and content creation. Panasonic Digital leverages Alibaba's Qwen models and data management tools for digital transformation, resulting in notable operational efficiencies.
Unity China employs Alibaba’s AI models to enhance its game development platform, Tuanjie AI-Codely, streamlining code comprehension and debugging. Similarly, Lion Parcel improved workflow efficiencies in finance and document processing using Alibaba’s Qwen model.
Loomi Entertainment Group has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to promote AI-generated content in Malaysia and beyond. By integrating Alibaba's visual generation models into its AI engine, Loomi enhances video production workflows and reduces costs. The partnership has also facilitated educational initiatives for local creators.
SHAKE is expanding its AI services across APAC markets by leveraging Alibaba’s infrastructure and models to develop ARP solutions, thereby enabling SMBs to transition into the agentic era efficiently.
AnyMind Group has formed a strategic agreement with Alibaba Cloud to integrate Qwen models into AnyLive, enhancing customer interaction and response accuracy in live commerce via lifelike AI avatars. This integration aims to improve real-time understanding and engagement with customers in various Asian languages.
Alibaba Cloud, a global provider of AI infrastructure and the intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced its latest global infrastructure expansion plan at the 2026 Apsara Conference, alongside a series of new AI capabilities designed to help enterprises build, deploy and scale AI applications more efficiently.
The technology company has also announced its comprehensive collaboration with global enterprises including Panasonic Digital, Unity China, Lion Parcel, Loomi Entertainment Group and SHAKE to accelerate enterprise innovation via its advanced AI and cloud technologies.
Accelerate enterprise innovation
Over the next 12 months, Alibaba Cloud will establish its first cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands, while expanding its data centre footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong. The expansion will further increase Alibaba Cloud’s global computing capacity and strengthen its ability to provide localised cloud and AI services to customers across key markets. The cloud leader currently operates 107 availability zones in 31 regions around the world.
“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, Chief Technology Officer and President of International Business of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Accessible AI capabilities
“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.”
At the conference, Alibaba Cloud launched three new AI solutions to help international businesses build and scale production-grade applications. Smart Studio, an out-of-the-box product designed to help businesses build dedicated Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms in minutes. It provides everything needed to package, price, meter, and bill model APIs under their own brand. Its advanced inference architecture delivers up to 505% higher throughput than standard open-source frameworks on the same hardware.
Multi-model deployment
Smart Fusion serves as an intelligent engine that helps users and businesses achieve state-of-the-art model performance at low cost through a unified standard model API. The engine supports multi-model collaboration within one task, selecting the best-suited available models to work together by analyzing real-time dimensions. By abstracting multi-model deployment into a single endpoint, it can help reduce token spending by around 50%.
Smart Video is an AI video agent designed for short-drama studios and advertisers to automatically create videos up to one hour long. With a single prompt, creators can turn an idea into a finished cut, while continuously refining it through natural language. The platform supports multiple video models, including Wan, and offers seamless support for more than 20 languages.
Diverse business needs
Alibaba’s cloud and AI technologies are helping customers and partners across industries address diverse business needs, from digital transformation and enterprise applications to logistics, gaming and AI-powered content creation. Through collaborations with enterprises including Panasonic Digital, Unity China, Lion Parcel, Loomi Entertainment Group and SHAKE, Alibaba Cloud is enabling businesses to enhance efficiency, accelerate innovation and explore new opportunities with cloud and AI.
Panasonic Digital (Shanghai) has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to accelerate its comprehensive digital and AI transformation. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian (Model Studio) to securely access the Qwen models, alongside advanced data management tools like DataWorks, MaxCompute, and Hologres, Panasonic has built a custom capability hub that powers specialized AI agents across manufacturing, supply chain, and corporate functions.
Significant operational benefits
This collaboration has delivered significant operational benefits. It has achieved an 80% reduction in documentation time through automated meeting minutes, a 10-fold increase in contract review efficiency using the “Smart Compare” agent, and enhanced data-driven decision-making by empowering non-technical staff to perform complex inventory analyses using natural language-all while ensuring strict data security and compliance through Alibaba Cloud’s robust governance features.
"We are very grateful for our strategic collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, which has been instrumental in accelerating Panasonic Digital's enterprise-wide AI transformation. By seamlessly integrating their world-class AI models and robust data infrastructure into our operations, we have successfully moved beyond isolated IT optimisations to build a highly scalable, secure, and unified intelligence platform,” said Yueming Li, Head of GenAI Innovation & Workforce, Panasonic Digital (Shanghai).
Supporting cross-team collaboration
Unity China, a pioneer game engine and real-time 3D development platform that operates the Tuanjie Engine, has leveraged Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio to deploy Qwen and third-party foundation models for Tuanjie AI-Codely, its AI-native engineering platform. Unity is a leading game engine and real-time 3D development platform. The platform streamlines production-scale game development by automating mission-critical workflows, including code comprehension, real-time editing, and debugging, while supporting cross-team collaboration.
“Game development is becoming increasingly complex, and our goal with Tuanjie AI is to remove technical friction so creators can focus on innovation and gameplay,” said Junbo Zhang, CEO of Unity China. “Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio and the Qwen model family provide the performance, flexibility, and low latency our developers require. By integrating these advanced AI capabilities directly into the development pipeline, we are enabling studios to debug, iterate, and bring ambitious game projects to life faster than ever before."
Manual data transcription
Lion Parcel, a pioneer Indonesian logistics and delivery provider, has leveraged Alibaba’s Qwen model to improve its finance and document processing workflows. To eliminate time-consuming and error-prone manual data transcription, Lion Parcel deployed the Qwen-VL-Plus model through Alibaba’s Model Studio platform to automate routine workflows. Supported by Alibaba Cloud's fully managed platform and predictable pay-per-token pricing, Lion Parcel has significantly accelerated processing efficiency, maximized data accuracy, and established a centralized digital repository that boosts overall business scalability.
“Alibaba Cloud’s OCR solution powered by Qwen helped us accelerate Document Order processing in Finance. It’s improving accuracy while saving both time and operational costs," said Probosetyo Krishna, Head of IT, Lion Parcel.
AI-generated content
Loomi Entertainment Group (LEG), a Malaysia-based entertainment company, has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to accelerate the adoption of AI-generated content (AIGC) among creators and businesses in Malaysia and the wider region. LEG has integrated Alibaba’s visual generation models, including Wan and HappyHorse through Model Studio, into Imaginary, its proprietary cinematic AI engine.
The integration enables high-quality video and visual generation, streamlines content production workflows, and helps reduce production costs. Additionally, the two companies have hosted two AIGC hackathons and trained more than 100 local content creators through online and offline workshops, providing creators with practical exposure to the latest generative AI tools and applications. Alibaba Cloud and LEG are also exploring the use of Wan in Loomi’s micro-drama production pipeline, alongside joint go-to-market initiatives and talent development programmes.
“Alibaba Cloud’s advanced AI models give creators new ways to turn ideas into engaging content more efficiently. Through this partnership, we look forward to bringing AIGC capabilities to more creators in Malaysia and the wider region, while exploring new possibilities for AI-powered content production,” said Ivan Tan, CTO of Loomi Entertainment Group.
Proprietary AI model
SHAKE, a pioneer in agentic resource planning (ARP) for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), is leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s powerful compute resources and Qwen models to expand its services across APAC markets. Through this partnership, SHAKE is building a proprietary AI model based on Qwen to deliver highly optimized ARP solutions. Additionally, SHAKE’s ARP services will be featured on the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace, supporting SMBs across industries to seamlessly transition into and thrive in the agentic era.
“By fusing SHAKE’s pioneer expertise in Agentic Resource Planning with Alibaba Cloud’s world-class compute infrastructure and cutting-edge Qwen models, we are unlocking unprecedented value for our customers. This collaboration serves as a powerful catalyst for our regional growth across APAC and marks a monumental milestone in our journey. Together, we are accelerating our vision to empower SMBs with the intelligent tools they need to thrive and scale in the agentic era,” said Sean Hinton, CEO of SHAKE.
Multi-model AI architecture
AnyMind Group, a BPaaS company for marketing, e-commerce and digital transformation, has today announced a strategic agreement with Alibaba Cloud to integrate Qwen, a family of large language and multimodal AI models developed by Alibaba, into AnyLive, AnyMind Group’s AI-powered live commerce platform. The integration is designed to improve how AnyLive understands customer questions and delivers accurate, contextually relevant responses in real time. Qwen will be added as one of the models within AnyLive’s multi-model AI architecture, utilized and delivered through lifelike AI avatars. Its language understanding capabilities will help AnyLive better interpret customer intent, including conversational or ambiguous questions, and generate more natural and relevant responses across Asian languages.
Akinori Kubo, Managing Director, Global E-Commerce, AnyMind Group, said: “The quality of a live commerce experience depends on how well brands understand customers and respond to their needs in the moment. Adding Qwen to AnyLive’s multi-model stack will strengthen intent analysis and response accuracy across Asian languages, helping brands create live rooms where customers feel understood and can make more informed purchase decisions.”
