Analysis This week Alibaba opened an AI war box with dozens of billions of dollars, a renewed LLM -Line -Up and plans for AI data centers in Europe. But it also led to a flurry of questions about how it will achieve all this in an increasingly fragmented IT landscape, when critical means are scarce.
The key to the question is the key – to be able to compete alibaba worldwide, it must position itself as close as possible to its users
At the APSARA conference of the Mega Vendor in Hangzhou, China, the detailed The latest iteration of his QWEN3-OMNI LLM, which can process text, images, audio and video while you generate text and speech.
It is crucial that it is available under an Apache 2.0 license, making it more tempting for companies to bind themselves to the ecosystems of Chatgpt et al.
But the Chinese Gigant also outlined plans for a chain of AI data centers that extend in the middle -East, Europe, Southeast -Asia and Latin -America. According to Reuters, it is planning to Invest $ 53 billion in AI infrastructure More than three years.
Alibaba already has 91 availability zones in 29 regions worldwide, including existing facilities in London and Germany.
The new blueprint would include its first data centers in the Netherlands, France and Brazil.
Alibaba database researcher Dr. Feifei Li said in a statement: “Our strategic expansion of the global infrastructure is designed to meet the accelerating demand of progressive customers.”
Neal Riley, AI Innovation Lead at the Adaptavian Group, told us: “The international competition for dominance in the Genai space has warmed up in the Modelara, with strong contenders that come from China such as Qwen and Deepseek. The movement by Alibaba is going to see a similar competition for ai -tooling for ai -tooling.
“The proximity of question is the key – to be able to compete alibaba worldwide, it must position itself as close as possible to its users.”
It is understanding that Alibaba is planning to offer a full series of services of the new European data centers, from standard cloud and elastic calculation services to big data analysis, machine learning and AI.
To tempt companies to use its facilities to “design, launch and scales” groundbreaking AI agents and applications “, it will offer a series of sources”, including a maximum of 2 billion free tokens on model studio, the one-stop generative AI development platform of Alibaba Cloud, and up to $ 120,000 cloud credits. “
However, one thing it is unlikely is access to the GPUs of Nvidia, which have become synonymous with AI infrastructure.
As a Chinese entity, Alibaba is blocked by Washington by buying Nvidia’s top-end kit. At the same time, the US wants to sell its Nvidia cut H20 parts to China – where Washington takes a reduction in those sales.
In the meantime, Beijing has said told Chinese companies not to use those Nvidia chips.
So what alternatives are there for Chinese companies the purchasing of full NVIDIA kit on the Gray Market?
Well, there is Alibaba’s own alternative, the T-head, which is now considered to go toe to toe with the H20Without giving a bribe to DC.
Would Alibaba European Consumers offer its own chips instead of the NVIDIA components that seem desperate to bring European governments to bring the AI ​​capacity of the continent in Europe? Alibaba does not say.
But it is also worth noting that, although Nvidia is stopped by doing chip business with alibaba, the two have announced tires on physical AI or robots, depending on your position.
Added to chip sovereignty, there is the broader issue of AI and data sovereignty.
European governments and customers are increasingly nervous about the chance that Washington lean on cloud providers and possibly gain access to European facilities – and the data in it. In June, Microsoft France -Execs confirmed that they could not warranty That data on French citizens can never be transferred to the US government without the explicit agreement of the French authorities.
But the Chinese authorities have their own ways to lean on cloud operators.
So will governments in the EU and beyond see Alibaba’s plans as a fast boost for their own autonomy? Or would they see them as a threat and they want to flow?
The EU protocols, Direct Investment (FDI) of the EU can be used when it is concerned about overseas entities that invest in critical national infrastructure – and data centers are undoubtedly seen as such.
That would be only one obstacle between the electricity, land and water shortages that make data center plans more complicated. Not to mention the local opposition. But it seems likely that Alibaba will assume the data center capacity of specialized operators. For example, the first wave of German data centers is in Vodafone facilities in Frankfurt.
This should mean that it is not subject to the EU FDI regime. And the data center providers have already done the heavy work around land, strength and planning. If there was any doubt that the data centers will go beyond the drawing table, would the company then have stabbed its neck and have announced? A remarkable exception to the blueprint of Alibaba was the UK, the site of one of the existing data centers of Alibaba.
A spokesperson for DSIT told us: “Although we would not speculate about possible investments, data centers are now regulated as a critical national infrastructure. The government can intervene to revise an investment agreement from each country if this can influence national security.”
Given the recent $ 42 billion trading pact between the UK and the USUnder the guidance of people like Microsoft and Google, the UK has enough to chew. After all, it includes around 120,000 GPUs thanks to Nvidia. ®
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