Alibaba Cloud Unveils New Datacenter and AI Services in Japan to Support Growing Demand

March 11, Tokyo, Japan - Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has announced the launch of its fourth datacentre in Japan to meet the country's growing demand for cloud and AI services.

Located in Tokyo, the new facility offers a comprehensive suite of cloud computing products—from storage, container, networking, robust computing, security, and databases to developer services. It adheres to Japan's stringent security standards and compliance regulations. With this fourth datacentre now operational, Alibaba Cloud aims to deliver Japanese customers high availability, exceptional resilience, and robust disaster recovery capabilities.

This expansion brings Alibaba Cloud's global infrastructure to 94 availability zones across 29 regions, providing a secure, scalable, robust, and sustainable cloud foundation to support customers worldwide in their digital innovation journeys.

To meet Japan's growing demand for AI services, Alibaba Cloud also plans to launch its AI development platform, Model Studio, in Japan in the second half of this year. The platform will offer inference services for both open-source and commercial Qwen models, and gradually launch capabilities such as batch data processing, fine-tuning, and deployment. These features are designed to enable local developers and businesses to build custom AI models and applications more cost-effectively and efficiently.

"The expansion of our cloud and AI infrastructure and services in Japan underscores our ongoing commitment to supporting the AI transformation needs of local customers," said Takeshi Kurita, General Manager of Japan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. "Leveraging our full-stack AI capabilities—from robust local infrastructure and diverse model development services to competitive AI models and co-developed solutions with local partners—we remain dedicated to empowering our customers in the digital era."

Since establishing its first Tokyo datacentre in 2016, Alibaba Cloud has supported Japanese customers across gaming, entertainment, retail, and IT sectors. It has since introduced a series of cutting-edge cloud and AI services to the market, as part of its commitment to meeting client’s rising demand for cloud-powered AI advancement.

Alibaba Cloud has been chosen as the trusted cloud service provider and partner for Japanese customers over the past year. A Tokyo-based AI startup FLUX partnered with Alibaba Cloud and developed a 32-billion-parameter Japanese language model based on Qwen, delivering more reliable, context-aware responses to finance industry-specific queries; and factory, a digital manga developer and studio, has collaborated with Alibaba Cloud to co-create AI-powered tools that enhance efficiency and creativity in manga creation; AI Storm, an IT services consultancy, also announced partnering with Alibaba Cloud to provide AI image generation tools and enterprise grade AI Agents to production studios, creative agencies, educational institutions, and other organizations across Japan.

About Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is a global leader in full-stack artificial intelligence services, offering state-of-the-art intelligent capabilities and a worldwide AI cloud computing network, providing developer-friendly AI services across the globe. Qwen (Chinese: Tongyi Qianwen) is a family of large language and multimodal AI models developed by Alibaba. Debuted in 2023, open-weight Qwen models are available to global developers via HuggingFace and ModelScope.