Alibaba(BABA, Financial) Cloud is set to launch its second South Korea data centre by end-June, part of a 380 billion yuan ($52.9 billion) AI and cloud push.
Bloomberg reports the new facility will bolster resilience and flexibility for local customers, supporting generative AI use cases across industries. Yoon Yong-joon, Alibaba Cloud's country manager, says the centre will deepen the digital ecosystem and spur AI innovation. This follows Alibaba's earlier commitment to massive infrastructure build-out in Asia.
The move also aligns with global peers: SK Telecom and Amazon (AMZN, Financial) Web Sevice (AWS) are partnering on a 103 MW AI data hub in Ulsan, with construction kicking off in August and an ultimate plan to house 60,000 GPUs, aiming to be Korea's largest AI-focused campus.
A second Alibaba Cloud node strengthens data sovereignty and performance for enterprises in South Korea, reducing latency and ensuring compliance with local regulations. For Alibaba, it cements its standing against AWS, Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) Azure, and Google(GOOG, Financial) Cloud in a key growth market hungry for generative AI services.
As AI workloads surge, redundant, high-capacity data centres will be a competitive differentiator. Watch uptime metrics, customer onboarding rates, and GPU availability as the new centre goes live.
