Alibaba Cloud to start second data centre in South Korea by June

[SEOUL] Alibaba Group Holding will open a second data centre in South Korea by the end of June, accelerating its multibillion-dollar bet on artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.

The new facility is part of a 380 billion yuan (S$68 billion) investment in AI and cloud infrastructure announced earlier this year, an Alibaba spokesperson said. The expansion comes in response to growing demand from South Korean businesses for cloud and AI services, the company said on Thursday (Jun 19).

Alibaba Cloud entered the South Korean market in 2022 with a data centre in Seoul, serving customers including AI solutions provider Univa and Naver subsidiary Snow that already use AliCloud’s foundational AI models, the company said. The company operates 87 availability zones across 29 global regions and is China’s largest cloud provider.

The move comes as Alibaba faces intensifying competition at home and pivots aggressively to AI. CEO Eddie Wu said in February that AI is now the firm’s “primary objective.” Alibaba has since released a series of large language models, including its latest Qwen3 line.

Alibaba Cloud’s move in South Korea comes as other global cloud business leaders expand infrastructure in the country. SK Telecom and Amazon Web Services have agreed to build a 103-megawatt AI data centre in the southern city of Ulsan, local media reported on Monday. They plan to break ground in August on a facility equipped with 60,000 graphics processing units, with plans to further expand it into the largest AI-dedicated centre in the country. BLOOMBERG