Alibaba Cloud announced on Wednesday it will open its first region in Mexico and expand with building new datacenters across Southeast Asia.

The org didn't offer a timeline or a reason for its Mexican debut, but Chinese manufacturers are increasingly targeting Mexico to take advantage of trade treaties that make it easier to access the US market than is possible from China amid current diplomatic tensions.

If Alibaba Cloud's Chinese customers are moving to Mexico, it makes sense for its cloud to follow.

The Chinese cloud champ also offered a three-year window for its deployment of extra resources in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea.

Although the majority of existing Alibaba Cloud regions are in China, the org has prioritized Asia as its target market and already enjoys top three cloud status in some regional markets. The org's cloud also has a presence in Australia, the US, the UK, Germany, and the Middle East.

The Chinese tech giant also indicated it would open its generative AI development platform, Model Studio, through its Singapore availability zone so that its LLM, Qwen, can be accessed internationally.

This week Alibaba Cloud made price cuts of up to a whopping 97 percent on Qwen.

The price cut was made to help Chinese orgs accelerate their AI app development efforts despite Alibaba recently boasting that its AI business was booming with over 7 million downloads of its Qwen model.

The discounts coincided with the introduction of cheap AI services from ByteDance, which spurred Baidu to cut the price of some services to zero.

Also this week, the parent company, Alibaba Group, revealed it would sell $4.5 billion in convertible senior notes so that it can free up some cash to repurchase shares.

Alibaba Group has had a turbulent month. Its Q1 earnings revealed an 86 percent drop in profit.

SoftBank, once Alibaba's biggest investor, told investors in an earnings call it had sold all its stake in the Chinese tech company.

Softbank's reasoning? To better focus on AI. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/05/24/alibaba_cloud_mexico_asia_expansion/