China's Alibaba Group has opened 2 data centres in Brazil, entering the South American market for the first time. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported on Aug. 27 local time that Alibaba will provide Brazilian companies with secure cloud infrastructure and agentic AI services.

Brazilian companies, startups, developers and public agencies can directly use Alibaba Cloud's full range of services on local infrastructure. Alibaba said it designed the infrastructure for core operations that require low latency, resilience and data governance.

Allen Guo (알렌 궈), head of Alibaba Cloud for Latin America and vice president for international business, described Brazil as one of the world's most dynamic digital economies and a key market for expansion in Latin America. He said Alibaba would support Brazilian companies in expanding AI capabilities based on the new infrastructure and a local partner ecosystem, and connect them to its global network.

Alibaba is also expanding cooperation with local technology companies in Brazil. Partners include the technology solutions company Inci and open-source software and enterprise IT services provider 4Linux.

The expansion brings Alibaba Cloud's footprint to 31 regions and 106 availability zones. Alibaba opened its first Latin American data centre in Mexico in early 2025, then added a third data centre in France in June and in South Korea earlier this month.

Alibaba said in February 2025 it would invest 380 billion yuan in AI infrastructure over three years. Last week, it confirmed it had already spent half of that amount as of the end of June.

The Brazil push came shortly after the release of a new AI model. A day earlier, Alibaba launched Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a multimodal preview of the next-generation Qwen4 model. The model has 125 billion parameters for its main model, with 6 billion active parameters per token. Revenue for the AI Cloud & Compute Services unit, which combines the cloud and chip businesses, was 48.4 billion yuan in the second quarter of 2026, marking the fastest pace of increase in the past 22 quarters.