Alibaba Cloud has expanded its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings to help drive global digital transformation, unveiling new AI models, platform upgrades, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools during its Spring Launch 2025 event. The company aims to meet the growing demand for AI solutions and enhance its international presence.
Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, highlighted the importance of these updates in providing businesses with secure, high-performance services, enabling them to innovate in an AI-driven world.
The centerpiece of this expansion is the global availability of Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary Qwen large language model (LLM) series, now accessible in Singapore. The Qwen series includes several specialized models like Qwen-Max, an advanced Mixture of Experts model; QwQ-Plus, designed for complex reasoning tasks; and QVQ-Max, which handles multimodal problems with visual input.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced upgrades to its Platform for AI (PAI), which now features distributed inference capabilities. This improvement enhances the ability to handle large models, particularly those with complex structures. The PAI-Elastic Algorithm Service (EAS) now includes a prefill-decode function, increasing performance and reducing operational costs.
In addition to infrastructure enhancements, Alibaba Cloud incorporated AI into its data management tools. The PolarDB database now supports in-database AI inference, improving efficiency for tasks like conversational agents and semantic searches.
Furthermore, the company launched two new SaaS AI tools: AI Doc, for intelligent document processing, and Smart Studio, an AI-powered content creation platform. These tools are set to transform industries like e-commerce and entertainment.
This push for AI expansion follows Alibaba’s announcement of a $53 billion investment in cloud and AI technologies over the next three years, reinforcing the company’s commitment to leading the global AI and cloud market.
