Alibaba Cloud Expands AI Infrastructure in Japan with Launch of Fifth Data Center and New Model Service Platform

TOKYO, Japan, June 18, 2026 – Alibaba Cloud, a leading global provider of AI infrastructure and the intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced the launch of its fifth data center in Japan. Located in Tokyo, the new facility aims to meet the accelerating demand from Japanese customers across key sectors — including retail, gaming, entertainment, and manufacturing — for advanced cloud and AI solutions to capture opportunities arising in the agentic AI era.

The new data center, launched just months after the company unveiled its fourth Japanese facility in March 2026, delivers a comprehensive suite of enterprise-grade cloud computing services. These include elastic computing, storage, containerization, networking, security, databases, and advanced developer tools. Built with strict data privacy and security standards, Alibaba Cloud’s Japan region, which is now comprising five data centers, equips Japanese businesses with high availability, operational resilience, and business continuity support.

This expansion brings Alibaba Cloud’s global network to 105 availability zones across 32 regions, reinforcing its commitment to providing a secure, scalable, and sustainable foundation to assist global customers’ digital transformation.

Additionally, a suite of AI-native database and data analytics services has been launched in Japan to meet the growing demand for AI infrastructure. Key offerings include AI-native database services such as Data Agent for Analytics (analytical insights), Meta (data asset and knowledge management), DAS (database operations and maintenance), and DataBridge (data ingestion). These solutions address diverse scenarios, ranging from data insights and enterprise asset management to intelligent O&M for multi-cloud, multi-engine databases and multimodal data preparation for AI. The portfolio also features DataWorks Data Agent, an intelligent assistant that accelerates traditional data warehouse development by reducing delivery cycles from days to minutes

To cater to the growing demand for enterprise agents, Alibaba Cloud has also made Model Studio, its one-stop enterprise-grade AI development platform, available in the Japan region. Notably, Model Studio’s CLI (Command Line Interface) for AI agents supports a wide range of AI capabilities, including text chat, image and video generation and editing, as well as speech synthesis and recognition. Japanese businesses and developers can now access Alibaba’s latest Qwen model, Qwen3.7-Plus, and other third-party LLMs, all backed by enterprise-grade security for online inferencing. In addition, HappyHorse, Alibaba’s video generation models, as well as Alibaba’s multimodal model, Qwen3.5-Omni, will soon be available on Model Studio in Japan:

• Qwen3.7-Plus: As Alibaba’s most capable multimodal agent model to date, it exhibits strong vision-language capabilities while demonstrating robust agentic strength in coding, tool use, and productivity workflows.
• HappyHorse: Alibaba’s video generation model HappyHorse is designed to facilitate producing high-quality, cinematic-style video content, empowering creative industries to bring ideas to life through AI-powered video generation.
• Qwen3.5-Omni: By unifying perception, reasoning, and generation across multiple modalities within a single, cohesive intelligence, the model is a versatile tool for diverse applications, including live streaming, intelligent voice assistants, and video caption creation for gaming and entertainment.

Takeshi Kurita, General Manager of Japan and South Korea, Alibaba Cloud commented: “The launch of our fifth data center in Tokyo, combined with the local availability of Model Studio and access to our latest AI models, marks a significant milestone in our commitment to Japan’s digital future. We are seeing unprecedented demand from Japanese enterprises who are eager to leverage agentic AI to drive innovation and efficiency. By providing robust, secure, and scalable infrastructure alongside cutting-edge AI solutions, we are hoping to support Japanese developers and businesses to not just adopt AI, but to lead in the agentic AI era.”

To unleash creativity and boost productivity for businesses, Alibaba Cloud plans to launch a series of workshops, hackathons, and events for Japanese developers and startups focused on building production-grade AI agents in the coming months.

About Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is a global leader in full-stack AI+Cloud solutions. It offers a comprehensive suite of flexible, scalable and secure cloud services built on a three-tiered architecture of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Model-as-a-Service (MaaS). Alibaba Cloud empowers enterprises worldwide with its full-stack AI capabilities, powered by Qwen (Chinese: Qianwen), a family of large language and multimodal AI models developed by Alibaba. Debuted in 2023, Qwen models are available to global developers via HuggingFace (open-weight) or through API on Model Studio, Alibaba’s one-stop, enterprise-grade AI development platform offering access to the full suite of Qwen foundation models.