Alibaba Cloud yesterday announced its first datacenters in Brazil, France, and The Netherlands, plus expansion of its presence in five other countries outside China.

The cloudy offshoot of giant e-tailer Alibaba already operates 91 availability zones in 29 regions, 14 of which are in China – a market in which it enjoys dominant market share thanks to both its solid offerings and the fact that global rivals AWS, Azure, and Google have limited presences in the Middle Kingdom.

Alibaba Cloud’s past expansion saw it focus on markets that enjoy close trade relationships with China – especially in Southeast Asia – a strategy it chose because Chinese companies wanted to use the same cloud wherever they operate and because the large Chinese diaspora around the region is open to working with the Middle Kingdom cloud.

Moving into Brazil suggests Alibaba Cloud is reusing its strategy, as the South American country is an increasingly important trade partner for China.

The move to France and The Netherlands is harder to explain, as both nations have expressed concern that Chinese tech vendors present risks to local users.

The company is also expanding its datacenter footprint in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai.

Dr. Feifei Li, Alibaba Cloud’s president of international business, said the motive for this round of expansion is bringing the company’s AI to the world. Alibaba Cloud has produced its own Qwen models and yesterday announced Qwen3-Max which it claims outperforms Chat GPT 5 and cracked third place on model-measuring service LMArena’s leaderboards.

Alibaba Cloud’s expansion plans haven’t always worked: It closed datacenters in Australia and India. The Register understands that Alibaba used co-location facilities in both countries rather than building its own facilities, a strategy that hyperscalers often employ when they need more capacity than is available in their own datacenters, or feel a market just isn’t big enough to justify the expense of a datacenter build.

A source with knowledge of the matter told The Register Alibaba Cloud’s Australian presence never grew beyond a few racks of servers, because locals felt working with a Chinese cloud posed unacceptable risks and shopped with other clouds instead.

Alibaba Cloud has previously said it plans to spend $53 billion on datacenter and AI infrastructure over the next three years, a very modest sum compared to its western rivals that have committed to spending $20 billion or more each quarter for the next couple of years. ®