Alibaba Cloud has officially expanded its AI strategy with a robust lineup of new foundational models, platform upgrades, and SaaS tools aimed at powering digital transformation on a global scale.
Accelerating AI Adoption Worldwide
During its Spring Launch 2025 event, Alibaba Cloud revealed a series of innovations designed to support businesses in their transition to AI-driven operations. Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, emphasized the company’s commitment to providing secure, high-performance solutions that enable global scalability and innovation.
“Our latest platform and AI advancements are built to support the growing demand for digital transformation around the world,” stated Yuan.
New Qwen AI Model Family Goes Global
At the heart of this initiative is the global rollout of Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary Qwen large language models (LLMs), which are now available via its Singapore infrastructure. These models include:
- Qwen-Max: A large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) model.
- QwQ-Plus: Designed for advanced reasoning, complex queries, and mathematical problem solving.
- QVQ-Max: A visual reasoning model that combines visual inputs with chain-of-thought outputs.
- Qwen2.5-Omni-7b: A fully multimodal model for diverse AI applications.
This expanded model suite empowers developers and enterprises with versatile tools to build sophisticated AI-powered products.
Platform Upgrades to Support Large-Scale AI
To handle the computational demands of these advanced models, Alibaba Cloud’s Platform for AI (PAI) has received major updates. Notably, the introduction of distributed inference through the PAI-Elastic Algorithm Service (EAS) now allows ultra-large models to be executed across multiple nodes.
Key benefits include:
- A 92% increase in concurrency
- A 91% boost in tokens per second (TPS) for the Qwen2.5-72B model
Additionally, the PAI-Model Gallery now hosts nearly 300 open-source models, including the full Qwen and Wan series. These models can be deployed and managed with a no-code interface, making them accessible to a broader user base.
AI-Driven Databases and Developer Tools
Alibaba Cloud has also integrated native AI inference into PolarDB, its flagship cloud-native relational database. This allows for seamless in-database machine learning, improving both efficiency and security by eliminating the need to export data for analysis.
PolarDB’s AI capabilities support applications like text embedding, semantic search, and conversational RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) agents. Meanwhile, AnalyticDB now connects directly with Model Studio, Alibaba’s generative AI development platform, serving as the go-to vector database for AI model training and deployment.
New SaaS Tools to Revolutionize Workflows
Two new AI-powered SaaS solutions aim to transform how industries operate:
- AI Doc: An intelligent document parser capable of analyzing and extracting data from complex documents. It also integrates with Alibaba’s Energy Expert for tasks like automated ESG reporting.
- Smart Studio: A creative platform supporting text-to-image, image-to-image, and text-to-video generation. This tool is especially useful for sectors such as e-commerce and entertainment, enabling features like virtual try-ons and AI-generated media assets.
Massive Investment to Cement AI Leadership
These announcements follow Alibaba’s earlier pledge to invest $53 billion over the next three years into AI and cloud infrastructure—exceeding its total investment in the space over the previous decade. This bold move underscores Alibaba’s ambition to remain a dominant force in global AI deployment.
As cloud and AI become the backbone of digital innovation, Alibaba Cloud’s comprehensive upgrades are set to redefine the landscape for businesses worldwide.
In a related development, efforts to align AI growth with sustainability are also gaining momentum. For instance, the UK’s AI Energy Council initiative is working to ensure AI innovation supports clean infrastructure and green growth—an approach that complements Alibaba’s sustainability-driven tools such as Energy Expert.
