Alibaba pushes into South America’s AI market with launch of Brazil data centres

Alibaba Group Holding has established its initial data centers in South America, as the Chinese tech giant expands its artificial intelligence infrastructure in emerging markets during a growing US-China AI competition. On Thursday, the company disclosed that its newly formed Brazilian subsidiary would provide secure cloud infrastructure and a range of "agentic AI services" to local businesses.

Allen Guo, Alibaba Cloud's general manager for Latin America and vice president of international business, stated that Brazil is a key market for Alibaba Cloud's growth in Latin America. Following its entry into Brazil, Alibaba Cloud now operates in 106 "availability zones" across 31 regions.

Alibaba's move highlights its rapid AI infrastructure development outside mainland China as it seeks new growth areas amid the intense US-China AI rivalry. The company aims to empower Brazilian enterprises, startups, developers, and public institutions with access to a full suite of cloud services operating on local infrastructure, optimized for low latency, resilience, and data governance necessary for critical workloads.

Alibaba is also collaborating with Brazilian technology firms like Insi and 4Linux to assist local enterprises in scaling AI capabilities.

While US tech behemoths such as Amazon and Microsoft expand in North America, Chinese companies are concentrating on offering competitive pricing and open-source solutions to capture the global market. In June, Alibaba unveiled its first data centers in France, continuing its European expansion due to increasing demands for data sovereignty on the continent.

Earlier this month, the firm inaugurated its third data center in South Korea. Alibaba has committed to a massive capital investment of 380 billion yuan (US$56.5 billion) over three years for AI infrastructure development, with half of that amount already allocated by the end of June. Following its launch of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a multimodal preview of its upcoming Qwen4 AI model with 125 billion parameters, Alibaba reported that revenue for its AI cloud and compute services reached 48.4 billion yuan in the second quarter of 2026, marking the fastest growth in the past 22 quarters.