The Chinese cloud giant is doubling down on Japan with a new facility and a suite of AI development tools aimed at enterprise clients.
Alibaba Cloud just opened its fifth data center in Tokyo, barely three months after launching its fourth in the same city.
The new facility, which went live on June 18, is designed to deliver enterprise-grade services spanning elastic computing, storage, networking, security, and databases. Alongside the data center, Alibaba Cloud also rolled out its Model Studio AI development platform to the Japanese market, giving businesses access to its Qwen family of AI models and a suite of multimodal tools.
What Alibaba is actually building in Japan #
The Model Studio platform provides access to Qwen3.7-Plus, an AI model built for developing AI agents. There’s also HappyHorse, a tool designed for video generation, and the upcoming Qwen3.5-Omni model, which promises enhanced multimodal capabilities. The company is also introducing new AI-native database and analytics services.
Alibaba Cloud is targeting several specific industries with this expansion: retail, gaming, entertainment, and manufacturing.
The broader strategic picture #
With the Tokyo addition, Alibaba Cloud now operates 105 availability zones across 32 regions globally.
Takeshi Kurita, General Manager of Japan and South Korea at Alibaba Cloud, called the launch “a significant milestone” in the company’s dedication to contributing to Japan’s digital future.
The fourth data center launched in March 2026, making the buildout from four to five data centers in a single Japanese market within roughly 90 days.
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