Alibaba announces new cloud regions in Europe and Turkey

Alibaba announced plans on Wednesday to establish its first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands over the next 12 months, while expanding data centre capacity in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong. The announcement came at the company's annual Apsara conference in Hangzhou, which runs through Thursday. Alibaba Cloud executive Li Feifei, chief technology officer and president of international business, said the expansion aims to bring computing resources closer to customers and partners as companies move AI from experiments into real-world deployment. One report indicated the first new data centre will open in the Netherlands in October. Alibaba also said it is training foundation models with five to ten trillion parameters, which would make them several times larger than the current largest Chinese model. The company unveiled the Zhenwu V900 AI chip, which Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu called the most powerful AI chip in China today. The company said the chip delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890.