Alibaba Cloud Strengthens AI Capabilities with Innovations for International Customers - Middle East Business News and Information

Mid East Info

12-04-2025

Advanced AI models, tools and infrastructure updates now available to international customers
April 2025 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today at its Spring Launch 2025 online event unveiled new AI models, tools and infrastructure upgrades for its international customers, underscoring its ongoing commitment to driving AI innovation worldwide.
'We are launching a series of Platform-as-a-Service（PaaS）and AI capability updates to meet the growing demand for digital transformation from across the globe. 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,' said Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. 'As cloud and AI become essential for global growth, we are committed to enhancing our core product offerings to address our customers' evolving needs.'
Alibaba Cloud announced new offerings to international customers by expanding access to its foundational models and upgrading infrastructure products. Available through the company's availability zones in Singapore, these models include the latest from its proprietary large language model (LLM) series, Qwen, such as the large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) model Qwen-Max, the reasoning model QwQ-Plus, the visual reasoning model QVQ-Max and the end-to-end multimodal model Qwen2.5-Omni-7b.
QwQ-Plus is an advanced reasoning model specializing in deep analytical thinking, tackling complex challenges like sophisticated QA tasks and expert-level math problems with precise, algorithm-driven solutions. Meanwhile, QVQ-Max is a visual reasoning model that effectively addresses complex multimodal problems with high accuracy and extended reasoning capabilities, supporting visual input and chain-of-thought output.
To further support the AI models on the PaaS front, Alibaba Cloud's Platform for AI (PAI) has rolled out major enhancements to support scalable, cost-effective, and user-friendly solutions for generative AI and LLMs. PAI-Elastic Algorithm Service (EAS) debuts distributed inference capabilities with a multi-node architecture to satisfy the growing demands of super-large models fueled by the rise of MoE structure and ultra-long-text processing, addressing the limitations of traditional single-node architecture. To further boost performance and reduce costs, PAI-EAS introduces the prefill-decode disaggregation function which has led to a 92% increase in concurrency and a 91% boost in tokens per second (TPS) when deployed with the Qwen2.5-72B model, greatly improving scalability and efficiency.
PAI-Model Gallery has been upgraded to provide a comprehensive selection of nearly 300 cutting-edge open-source models, including the full range of Alibaba Cloud's proprietary open-source models Qwen and Wan series, all accessible through a seamless, no-code deployment and management experience. It offers diverse deployment methods with underlying computing resources, along with new features like model evaluation for performance insights and model distillation, which reduces deployment costs by transferring knowledge from large to small models.
To enhance data management efficiency in the AI era, Alibaba Cloud has integrated its native AI inference capabilities – powered by Qwen – into its flagship cloud-native relational database PolarDB. With in-database machine learning capabilities, it eliminates data shifting typically required for inference workflow, significantly reducing processing latency while boosting efficiency and data security. Engineered for text-centric workloads, the new feature is ideal for scenarios including conversational RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) agent development, text embedding generation, and semantic similarity search.
It also integrates its data warehouse AnalyticDB into Model Studio, Alibaba Cloud's generative AI model and application development platform, as the recommended vector database for RAG solutions. This enhancement connects organizations' proprietary knowledge bases directly to AI models and tools available on Model Studio, streamlining development of context-aware applications.
New SaaS AI Tools to Accelerate Industry Transformation:
Alongside its AI models, infrastructure and platform upgrades, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a new suite of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) AI products aimed at accelerating digital transformation across industries. Powered by AI, these tools will enable international customers to expand their capabilities in data analytics, automation and content creation. AI Doc: An intelligent document processing tool that leverages LLMs to efficiently parse various types of documents, including business reports, forms, product manuals and purchase documents, accurately extract information based on business requirements, and swiftly generate tailored reports. For example, when deployed within Alibaba Cloud's AI-driven sustainability solution, Energy Expert, businesses can process documents quickly, and generate the reports that follow environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting frameworks, guidelines, and standards.
Smart Studio: An AI-powered content creation platform enabling seamless text-to-image, image-to-image and text-to-video applications to enhance marketing and creative outputs across various industries, such as e-commerce, gaming, education, and entertainment. For instance, it can harness the power of AI create personalized online shopping experiences for customers, allowing users to effortlessly change outfits, customize virtual hairstyles, makeup, and accessories, and generate images from natural-language descriptions or product designs in a single click.
At the event, Alibaba Cloud also launched a new AI search function on its official website. Powered by Qwen, this AI assistant is designed to help potential enterprise clients, especially SMEs, speed up their solution discovery and gain key insights to facilitate strategic decision-making. It also offers access to cost-effective and scalable cloud solutions, along with free AI and cloud computing training resources.
Upgraded partner incentive policies were also introduced to better support resellers and distributors by providing increased flexibility, higher commission rates, and more rewarding opportunities for mutual growth. This commitment to empowering partners is further reinforced by enhanced training and support resources, designed to strengthen their capabilities and drive success within evolving ecosystem.
In February 2025, Alibaba Group announced an investment of US $53 billion (RMB 380 billion) over the next three years to advance its cloud computing and AI infrastructure, reinforcing its commitment to long-term technological innovation. This historic investment, which exceeds Alibaba's total AI and cloud spending over the past decade, underscores the company's ongoing dedication to AI-driven growth and its role as a leading global cloud provider. Alibaba Cloud now operates a global infrastructure network with 87 availability zones across 29 regions.
About Alibaba Cloud:
Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Alibaba has been named the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner. It has also maintained its position as one of the world's leading public cloud IaaS service providers since 2018, according to IDC.