Alibaba Cloud Expands AI Capabilities with New Models and Infrastructure Enhancements
Alibaba Cloud has announced a significant expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, introducing a suite of new models, tools, and infrastructure upgrades aimed at bolstering its services for international customers. This development was unveiled during the company’s Spring Launch 2025 online event, reflecting Alibaba’s commitment to advancing its cloud computing and AI infrastructure.
Selina Yuan, president of international business at Alibaba Cloud, emphasized the company’s dedication to meeting the growing global demand for digital transformation. “We are launching a series of platform-as-a-service and AI capability updates to meet the growing demand for digital transformation from across the globe,” Yuan stated. “These upgrades allow us to deliver even more secure and high-performance services that empower businesses to scale and innovate in an AI-driven world.”
Central to the announcement is the expanded access to Alibaba Cloud’s foundational models, including the latest iterations of its proprietary large language model (LLM) series, Qwen. These models, now available through the company’s availability zones in Singapore, encompass the large-scale mixture of experts model Qwen-Max, the reasoning model QwQ-Plus, the visual reasoning model QVQ-Max, and the multimodal model Qwen2.5-Omni-7b.
QwQ-Plus is engineered for deep analytical thinking, capable of handling complex question-and-answer tasks and expert-level mathematical problems with algorithm-driven precision. QVQ-Max focuses on visual reasoning, addressing intricate multimodal problems with enhanced accuracy and extended reasoning capabilities, supporting both visual input and chain-of-thought output.
Supporting these advanced models is a significantly upgraded Platform for AI (PAI), Alibaba Cloud’s machine learning platform. The PAI-Elastic Algorithm Service (EAS) now features distributed inference capabilities with a multi-node architecture, designed to manage the increasing demands of super-large models, particularly those utilizing mixture of experts structures and ultra-long-text processing. Additionally, PAI-EAS introduces a prefill-decode disaggregation function, which the company claims leads to a 92% increase in concurrency and a 91% increase in tokens per second when deployed with the Qwen2.5-72B model.
The PAI-Model Gallery has also undergone a substantial upgrade, now offering nearly 300 open-source models. This includes the full range of Alibaba Cloud’s open-source Qwen and Wan series, all accessible through a no-code deployment and management interface. The gallery provides diverse deployment methods and underlying computing resources, along with new features such as model evaluation for performance insights and model distillation to reduce deployment costs.
In an effort to facilitate efficient data management in the AI era, Alibaba Cloud has integrated its native AI inference capabilities, powered by Qwen, into its flagship cloud-native relational database, PolarDB. This integration aims to eliminate the need for data shifting typically required for inference workflows, thereby reducing latency and improving efficiency and data security. This is particularly suited for text-centric workloads, including conversational retrieval-augmented generation agent development, text embedding generation, and semantic similarity search.
Beyond infrastructure and platform enhancements, Alibaba Cloud has introduced a suite of software-as-a-service AI products, including AI Doc, an intelligent document processing tool that leverages LLMs to parse various document types, extract information, and generate tailored reports.
These latest updates follow Alibaba’s February 2025 announcement of a $53 billion investment over three years to advance its cloud computing and AI infrastructure. Alibaba Cloud currently operates a global infrastructure network spanning 87 availability zones across 29 regions.
According to Synergy Research Group, the global public cloud market reached $330 billion in 2024, up $60 billion from 2023. The research firm noted that generative AI has driven half of the market growth over the past two years, through a combination of new platforms and services, GPU as a service, and enhancements to a wide range of other cloud services. During the fourth quarter of 2024, Alibaba Cloud’s market share stood at 4%, trailing behind Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Alibaba’s intensified focus on AI and cloud services aligns with broader trends in the technology sector, where companies are increasingly investing in advanced AI capabilities to meet the evolving needs of businesses worldwide. The company’s strategic investments and product enhancements underscore its ambition to be a leading player in the global AI and cloud computing landscape.
