Alibaba Cloud Launches Third Data Center in South Korea

New facility to provide robust and secure AI infrastructure for South Korean businesses

Seoul, Korea, 18 August, 2026 – Alibaba Cloud, a leading global provider of AI infrastructure and the intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced the launch of its third data center in South Korea. The new facility marks a significant expansion of Alibaba Cloud’s local footprint, providing Korean businesses with robust, scalable and secure cloud infrastructure, as they accelerate their AI adoption.

Since entering the South Korean market in 2016, Alibaba Cloud has been providing cloud and digital transformation services to local enterprise customers and partners. Following the launch of its first data center in South Korea in 2022 and its second data center in 2025, the third data center reflects Alibaba Cloud’s long-term commitment to South Korea as one of Asia’s key AI and digital markets.

Through the new data center, Alibaba Cloud plans to further strengthen its local infrastructure foundation to support South Korean businesses in running AI and cloud-based services. The new facility will support a comprehensive suite of enterprise cloud computing services, including compute, storage, networking, security, databases, containers and cloud-native services. This will help local customers run mission-critical workloads with enhanced service availability, operational stability, low latency and disaster recovery capabilities.

To meet the growing demand for enterprise AI agents, Alibaba Cloud will also expand its agentic AI service offerings in South Korea, including AgentRun, STAROps, ACS Agent Sandbox, Agent Security Center, AI Security Guardrails 2.0 and Agentic SOC. These services are designed to help enterprises manage the full lifecycle of AI agents, from development, testing and deployment to operations and security management.

As part of Alibaba’s US$53 billion AI infrastructure commitment, the new data center brings Alibaba Cloud’s global network to 104 availability zones across 30 regions. By prioritizing strict data privacy and sovereignty, the infrastructure adheres to local regulatory frameworks and standards regarding cybersecurity, resilience and data governance.

Yongjoon Yoon, Country Manager of South Korea, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, speaks at a press conference in Seoul.

“South Korea is a key market where Alibaba Cloud has continued to make long-term investments,” said Yongjoon Yoon, Country Manager of South Korea, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “The third data center is not merely an infrastructure expansion. It is an investment to help South Korean enterprises operate AI and cloud-based services more reliably. Alibaba Cloud will continue to support the digital transformation of South Korean businesses with robust, scalable and secure cloud infrastructure and AI services.”

Building South Korea’s AI Growth with Customers

The expansion of local infrastructure is closely connected to how South Korean customers are applying Alibaba Cloud’s technologies in real business environments. Alibaba Cloud has been working with local customers and partners to develop and operate AI-powered services.

Gwangju-based AI pioneer Gendive is redefining enterprise automation with the integration of Alibaba Cloud’s cutting-edge AI models into its flagship platform, DevDive. As a model-agnostic AI Agentic WorkOS, DevDive enables organizations to build, orchestrate, and scale complex, AI-powered business workflows without writing a single line of code. By incorporating Alibaba Cloud’s advanced AI models—including Wan for video generation and HappyHorse for image generation—Gendive has expanded DevDive's capabilities. This integration empowers South Korean businesses to seamlessly automate end-to-end tasks, ranging from sophisticated document analysis to the automated creation of rich visual and multimedia content.

"Our mission with DevDive is to democratize advanced AI, making it incredibly simple for enterprises to design and scale complex workflows without any coding barriers," said Minhyeok Ham, CEO of Gendive. "Partnering with Alibaba Cloud allows us to bring world-class generative AI directly into the hands of Korean businesses. By embedding powerful models like Wan and HappyHorse into our WorkOS, we are enabling our clients to effortlessly bridge the gap between back-office data analysis and front-facing creative content generation on a single, unified platform."

ZEPETO, a leading metaverse platform run by NAVER subsidiary NAVER Z, has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to elevate its virtual experiences across Asia. "By utilizing Alibaba Cloud’s high-performance infrastructure, ZEPETO powers seamless, real-time 3D avatar generation and immersive rendering, enabling millions of users to connect and interact simultaneously with zero lag." said Soonkoo Lee, Head of Engineering from NAVER Z.

Alibaba Cloud is also pursuing a strong partnership strategy to enhance its services in the South Korean market. It has partnered with leading local firms such as Megazone Soft and Team Sparta to deliver tailored consulting services and industry-specific solutions.

Expanding Infrastructure to Support Enterprise AI Adoption

This new data center launch is closely aligned with Alibaba’s AI+Cloud strategy. Alibaba is strategically positioned to lead in the next phase of AI adoption. Its Qwen model family has become a widely used open-source model worldwide, with over 3 billion downloads and more than 300,000 derivative models created by developers worldwide.

Alibaba Cloud has recently expanded its cloud infrastructure in key markets including France, Japan, Malaysia and Mexico, further strengthening its global AI and cloud foundation and providing resilient cloud and AI infrastructure to support customers around the world in their digital transformation journeys.

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.