(Yicai) July 15 -- Globalization is not a short-term investment for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International but a process of continuous evolution, its president said while revealing the Chinese cloud services provider's related strategies, especially in capturing overseas markets amid waves of artificial intelligence.

After a decade of development, Alibaba Cloud operates 89 availability zones in 29 regions worldwide, offering services to about 5 million clients, including the International Olympic Committee, BMW Group, software firm SAP, and LVMH, Selina Yuan, who is also vice president of Alibaba Group Holding, said in a recent interview with Yicai. Over 200 of its cloud computing and AI products and solutions have hit overseas markets, she added.

Alibaba Cloud has built new data centers in Mexico, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, and other regions this year, aiming to speed up the construction of global cloud computing networks that cover China, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas due to demand stimulus, she said.

The sped-up deployment of AI applications worldwide is constantly increasing customers' demand for cloud resources, AI products, and services, making it a must for the company to enhance its local response capabilities, Yuan added.

A new round of high-speed development for cloud computing plus AI will emerge over the next three to five years or longer, with Alibaba Cloud adopting the open-source strategy in the AI field, Yuan said. Its large language model Qwen has open-sourced more than 200 models, with the number of derivative models exceeding 140,000, making it one of the world's biggest open-sourced model series, she pointed out.

In addition, Alibaba Cloud has proactively allied with its customers to create LLM applications, Yuan noted. For example, it helped UK consumer healthcare giant Haleon debut an AI nutrition assistant, which has significantly shortened the response time for nutritionists, she said.

Regarding market positioning, Asia is one of Alibaba Cloud's most significant markets, and the cloud service provider boasts data centers in Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, Yuan said, adding that the prosperous development of digitization, cloud computing, and AI in Latin American markets has also captured the firm's attention.

Alibaba Cloud will adopt flexible and diverse market strategies for the Middle East and European markets, which contain new opportunities, according to Yuan.

On average, more than 60 percent of Alibaba Cloud's overseas team members are hired locally, with the share reaching 70 to 80 percent in some countries, boosting the firm's localized services, Yuan said. Through AI technologies, the company constantly enhances its capability in services related to local languages, with Qwen supporting 119 languages, she noted, adding that it also collaborates with 120 overseas universities to co-develop systems that train and empower local talents.

Alibaba Cloud will continue to invest more in infrastructure, AI-related capabilities, and local service systems over the next three to five years to build a cloud computing network that is technically competitive to embrace the AI wave with customers and partners worldwide, Yuan said.

Editor: Martin Kadiev