DEPLOYDatabase

Company

Alibaba Cloud

www.alibabacloud.com

Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) is the cloud and AI infrastructure arm of Alibaba Group, founded in September 2009 in Hangzhou and today the dominant public-cloud…

Track Alibaba Cloud
Founded
2009
HQ
Hangzhou, China (international HQ Singapore)
Status
Subsidiary

Overview

Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) is the cloud and AI infrastructure arm of Alibaba Group, founded in September 2009 in Hangzhou and today the dominant public-cloud operator in China and the Asia-Pacific market by Gartner and IDC share. Unlike the pure-play neocloud pack (CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe), Alibaba Cloud is a full hyperscaler: it sells IaaS, PaaS, databases, and CDN alongside GPU capacity, and its AI story rides on two proprietary pillars, the PAI (Platform for AI) training and inference stack and the Qwen family of open-weights foundation models that Alibaba itself trains, serves, and licenses.

In February 2025 the company said it would spend more than 380 billion yuan (about 53 billion US dollars) on cloud and AI infrastructure over the following three years, a figure larger than its combined AI-infra spend across the prior decade and the biggest disclosed AI capex commitment by any Chinese company. The build-out is constrained on the silicon side by US export controls: Alibaba Cloud has publicly bought Nvidia's China-only H20 accelerators, has ramped in-house T-Head Yitian ARM CPUs, and is one of the biggest customers for domestic Chinese AI chips including Huawei Ascend, though it has not disclosed a total GPU count. It operates data centers across 29 regions and 87 availability zones globally as of its most recent disclosure, with 2025-2026 expansion pushes into Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines), Mexico, and the Middle East (Dubai, Riyadh).

What separates Alibaba Cloud from the Western neocloud set is that its anchor tenant is itself: Qwen inference, Taobao and Tmall commerce, Ele.me delivery, Cainiao logistics, and DingTalk collaboration all run on it, and the Qwen-3 series (culminating in Qwen3-Max at trillion-plus parameters, released in 2026) has become one of the most widely deployed open-weights model families outside the US. Positioning is genuinely dual: it is a training platform for its own frontier models and for enterprise fine-tunes, and a very high-volume inference operator for Chinese and Southeast Asian consumer traffic. Alibaba Group trades on NYSE (BABA) and HKEX (9988); the cloud unit sits inside the Alibaba Group holding structure after a planned 2023-2024 spinout was called off.

Verified record

Verified deployments
None on file
Active incidents
None on file

Key facts

Origin

Launched in September 2009 as Aliyun.

Parent

Wholly owned by Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA; HKEX: 9988); a planned 2023 spinout of the cloud unit was cancelled in November 2023.

AI and cloud capex (company-stated, Feb 2025)

More than 380 billion yuan (about $53 billion) committed to AI and cloud infrastructure over three years.

Global footprint

29 regions and 87 availability zones per the company; the largest cloud operator in China and APAC, per Gartner.

GPU inventory (reported)

Not disclosed; reported as one of the largest buyers of Nvidia's China-only H20 and of Huawei Ascend 910B/910C.

GPU pricing

No single global rate card; A100 and H20 instances are quoted per region on the ECS console.

Silicon partners

Nvidia (H20 in China, H100/H200 internationally), Huawei Ascend, AMD, and the in-house T-Head Yitian 710 ARM CPU (Oct 2021).

Anchor workloads

Qwen, Taobao/Tmall, DingTalk, Cainiao and Ele.me run on it; external customers include Xiaohongshu and many Chinese SaaS firms.

Qwen models

Open-weight LLMs launched April 2023; Qwen3-Max, at roughly 2.4 trillion parameters, released August 2026 with Apache 2.0 distilled variants.

PAI platform

PAI is the training and inference layer; Qwen models are served through PAI-EAS and Model Studio.

New zones (2025-2026)

Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico and the UAE, under the three-year capex commitment.

Positioning

A hyperscaler doing training and inference at scale, and its own largest AI customer via Qwen and Alibaba consumer properties.

Data & sources

News coverage

1

Web sources

5

6 sources backing this record.View all →

Current leadership (3)

  • Eddie Wu CEO, Alibaba Group; direct oversight of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group since September 2023reported, not verified
  • Joe Tsai Chairman, Alibaba Groupreported, not verified
  • Jingren Zhou CTO, Alibaba Cloud Intelligencereported, not verified

Safety record

No incidents on record for Alibaba Cloud.

Only active incidents are counted. Retracted incidents are excluded from this summary but remain reachable at their canonical URLs.

Full safety record: incidents, sourcing, and exposure data →

Alibaba Cloud on the data-center map

Every verified data center Alibaba Cloud operates that has a mapped coordinate (10 total). Filled circles are Tier-2 facilities and Tier-1 campuses under this operator; click any pin to open its record.

Alibaba Cloud data centers (15)

AI data centers Alibaba Cloud operates or is a party to, from the DEPLOY data center registry.

Recent coverage

Alibaba Cloud in third-party press

Alibaba AI cloud revenue seen up over 50%

Oct 9, 2026

Alibaba Cloud Unveils Qwen Book AI Agent PC: Skill Keyboard, AI Island Display and Omarchy OS Collab

Sep 24, 2026

Alibaba Cloud Unveils Agentic Cloud Stack: AgentCore, Next-Gen CPFS and HPN 8.0 Pro

Sep 23, 2026

Mentioned on (25)

Registry pages whose text names Alibaba Cloud.