Alibaba Cloud, a cloud and AI infrastructure provider, is expanding its global data centre footprint and rolling out new AI products as financial services and other businesses look to move artificial intelligence from experimentation into production.
The company announced plans to open its first cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands within the next year, alongside expansions in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong. Alibaba Cloud said the investment will increase its global computing capacity while allowing it to provide cloud and AI services tailored to local markets.
Alibaba Cloud currently operates 107 availability zones across 31 regions globally. The announcements were made at the 2026 Apsara Conference, where the company also unveiled three new AI products aimed at enterprise deployment.
For financial institutions, the expansion could provide greater access to local cloud infrastructure as banks, insurers and other financial services businesses look to deploy AI applications while managing data, performance and infrastructure requirements across different markets.
Smart Studio allows businesses to create branded Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms, with tools for packaging, pricing, metering and billing model APIs. Alibaba Cloud said its inference architecture can achieve throughput up to 505% higher than standard open-source frameworks running on the same hardware.
Smart Fusion is designed to combine multiple AI models within a single task through a standard API. It can select models based on real-time factors, with Alibaba Cloud claiming that routing multi-model deployments through a single endpoint can reduce token costs by around 50%.
The third product, Smart Video, is an AI video agent aimed at short-drama studios and advertisers.
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