Alibaba Cloud used its 2026 Apsara Conference in Hangzhou to lay out a 12-month plan that touches eight markets, and Malaysia is one of them. The company said it will expand its data centre footprint in Malaysia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong, while opening its first cloud regions in Turkiye, Finland and the Netherlands. It currently runs 107 availability zones across 31 regions worldwide.
For local businesses, more capacity on the ground means the cloud and AI services they lean on sit closer to home, which usually points to lower latency and a simpler path through data residency rules. Malaysia has become one of the region's busiest destinations for data centre money, and the strain that boom puts on the power grid is already a live question here.
Alongside the infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud launched three AI products for enterprises. Smart Studio lets a company stand up its own Model-as-a-Service platform and bill model APIs under its own brand. Smart Fusion routes a single task across several models through one endpoint, which the company says can cut token spending by around half.
The third, Smart Video, is aimed squarely at content teams. It is an AI video agent that can turn one prompt into a cut up to an hour long, refine it through plain language, and work across more than 20 languages. It runs on Alibaba's Wan model family, the same engine we looked at when Wan 3.0 turned a spreadsheet into a video ad.
The Malaysian thread runs deeper than a data centre. Loomi Entertainment Group, a Malaysia-based studio, has built Alibaba's Wan and HappyHorse models into Imaginary, its own cinematic AI engine, and is testing Wan inside its micro-drama production line. The two companies have run two AI content hackathons and trained more than 100 local creators through workshops. "Alibaba Cloud's advanced AI models give creators new ways to turn ideas into engaging content more efficiently," said Ivan Tan, Chief Technology Officer of Loomi Entertainment Group.
The expansion sits on top of a wider enterprise push. Alibaba named partners including Panasonic Digital, Unity China, Indonesia's Lion Parcel and the SMB planning firm SHAKE, each building on its Qwen models for jobs from contract review to game debugging. Alibaba is also the company behind the AI tools now offered free to 100,000 young Malaysians through the government's AI untuk Rakyat programme.
For Malaysia, the read is straightforward: the cloud that a growing list of local firms already run on is about to do more of its computing onshore.
