Alibaba Cloud Upgrades Flagship Database PolarDB with AI-Ready Capabilities

Alibaba Cloud has unveiled AI Lakebase architecture alongside a suite of upgrades for its flagship database, PolarDB at PolarDB Developer Conference in China.

Innovative AI Lakebase architecture balancing flexibility with high-performance
Empowering a Global Ecosystem of Over 20,000 Customers

Hangzhou, China, 26 January, 2026 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has unveiled AI Lakebase architecture alongside a suite of upgrades for its flagship database, PolarDB at PolarDB Developer Conference in China. By integrating native Large Language Model (LLM) functionality, the "AI-ready" PolarDB transforms data systems from simple storage repositories into intelligent engines. This evolution allows enterprises to query multimodal data and leverage AI-driven insights directly within data systems, significantly streamlining the development of AI applications.

As a core component of PolarDB, the AI Lakebase architecture unifies storage and analytics to deliver a seamless data platform. By integrating the flexibility of data lake with the performance of data warehouse, it provides a robust foundation for intelligent enterprise data management. The solution breaks down data silos, enabling consistent and unified access across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Besides, its AI-driven cache acceleration optimizes I/O and bandwidth to ensure the efficient flow of massive data volumes.

By integrating a multimodal engine with proprietary In-database AI (Model-as-an-Operator), PolarDB allows for semantic retrieval and inference directly within the database. This boosts efficiency and ensures data stays within the local domain for privacy and compliance. The solution also fuses KVCache, graph databases, and vector engines into a high-performance retrieval framework that balances long- and short-term memory with minimal overhead.

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Dr. Feifei Li, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, and President of Database Products, said: “The shift toward AI-native databases is an inevitable technology evolution. Moving from cloud-native to AI-ready, and ultimately to AI-native, PolarDB will serve as a robust 'intelligent data engine.' We are deepening the integration of AI and database innovation to support our customers in the AI era."

"By unifying multimodal data management, integrated search, model operators, and back-end data service for AI agent, Alibaba Cloud provides the intelligent and secure data foundation necessary for the next generation of AI," added Dr. Li.

A Proven Foundation for Innovation: Serving 20,000+ Global Enterprises

With a global customer base exceeding 20,000, Alibaba Cloud PolarDB’s cloud-native and "Data+AI" innovations have been deployed by businesses across multiple industries, spanning scenarios such as autonomous driving, digital payments, and risk management.

At the PolarDB Developer Conference, Alex Zhang, VP of Engineering at GoTo Group, the largest digital ecosystem in Indonesia, said: “We have adopted Alibaba Cloud PolarDB for our lending business. Amid rapid growth, our core transaction and settlement systems have delivered a significant uplift in performance, enabled by PolarDB’s elasticity and highly available services. In particular, for GoPay Later, our credit payment product, PolarDB’s serverless, on-demand scaling has reliably handled peak traffic while helping us reduce cloud resource usage by around 50%."

Luo Bin, Senior Data Architect at Li Auto, a leading Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, commented: "Li Auto operates across a diverse range of scenarios, including assisted driving, smart cockpits, and enterprise intelligence. PolarDB’s AI-centric capabilities—such as KVCache and Supabase integration—enable us to rapidly develop and deploy domain-specific AI applications. Especially in scenarios involving massive hot data processing, AI coding, and high-efficiency enterprise knowledge base retrieval, PolarDB provides robust performance and scalability. This has significantly reduced technical complexity and accelerated the rollout and iteration of our AI initiatives."

Atlas (atlaslovestravel.com), a Singapore-based travel technology solution provider specializing in direct low-cost carrier (LCC) distribution, processes over 1 billion daily flight searches with industry-leading 97% booking success rates and 99% pricing accuracy—metrics traditional platforms struggle to achieve. This operational excellence stems from Atlas's AI-first orchestration architecture built on Alibaba Cloud's PolarDB. The cloud-native database's decoupled compute-storage design enables Atlas to scale elastically during peak search periods whilst reducing infrastructure costs by 30%. PolarDB Global Database Network (GDN) ensures flight pricing consistency across all regions, eliminating the price discrepancies that frustrate travelers worldwide.

Most significantly, PolarDB's in-database model inference capability allows Atlas to run AI pricing predictions directly alongside real-time flight data—delivering the split-second intelligence that powers proactive problem-solving and keeps booking success rates well above industry standards.

As demand for intelligent, scalable, and integrated data infrastructure continues to surge, Alibaba Cloud remains committed to redefining what cloud databases can achieve in the AI era. Last month, Alibaba Cloud was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS) for the sixth consecutive year.

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Alibaba Cloud Upgrades Flagship Database PolarDB with AI-Ready Capabilities

A Proven Foundation for Innovation: Serving 20,000+ Global Enterprises

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