Alibaba Cloud has initiated a significant international expansion of its data center operations and announced a strategic collaboration with Nvidia to accelerate the development of Physical AI. The partnership centers on integrating Nvidia’s comprehensive Physical AI software stack into Alibaba’s cloud platform, providing developers with powerful new tools to build and deploy advanced robotics and other intelligent systems that interact with the real world. This move, revealed at the annual Apsara Conference 2025, signals a major push to lower the barrier for creating sophisticated autonomous machines by combining Nvidia’s specialized simulation and AI model architecture with Alibaba’s vast, globally distributed cloud infrastructure.
The collaboration aims to create a robust, cloud-native environment for the entire lifecycle of Physical AI development, a field focused on enabling machines like humanoid robots and autonomous vehicles to perceive, reason, and act in complex physical environments. By offering this integrated platform, the two technology giants intend to resolve persistent software bottlenecks that have historically slowed the commercialization of robotics. Developers will gain access to an end-to-end solution that includes synthetic data generation, digital twin simulations, and model validation, streamlining the difficult transition from virtual testing to real-world application. This initiative is paired with a major build-out of Alibaba Cloud’s global footprint, designed to meet the surging enterprise demand for high-performance AI and cloud services across continents.
Expanding Global Infrastructure for AI
To support its growing AI ambitions, Alibaba Cloud is undertaking a massive expansion of its worldwide infrastructure. The company announced new data centers in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with additional facilities planned for Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai over the next year. This expansion builds upon its existing network of 91 availability zones across 29 regions, significantly enhancing its capacity to serve a growing international client base. According to Dr. Feifei Li, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, this strategic growth is a direct response to accelerating demand from customers looking to leverage AI for business value and innovation.
Alongside the physical infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud is establishing new regional service centers in Indonesia and Germany to provide 24/7 multilingual customer support. The company also introduced its AI Catalyst Program, an initiative designed to foster a stronger global technology ecosystem. The program aims to equip select AI firms with expert mentorship, access to Alibaba’s advanced AI toolsets, and substantial allocations of cloud credits and tokens to fuel their innovation efforts and help them scale groundbreaking AI applications.
Integrating Nvidia’s Physical AI Stack
The core of the collaboration is the integration of Nvidia’s full Physical AI software stack into Alibaba’s Platform for AI (PAI). This creates a unified, cloud-based environment where developers can accelerate breakthroughs in areas like humanoid robotics and autonomous systems. Physical AI represents a shift toward embodied artificial intelligence, where AI models must understand instructions and perform complex tasks safely and autonomously in the real world. The partnership provides a platform for this, combining Nvidia’s specialized tools with Alibaba Cloud’s scalable computing resources.
Nvidia’s technology enables a seamless transition from simulation to reality (S2R), a critical step in reducing the high costs and risks associated with robotics development. Developers can create digital twins of factories, warehouses, or urban spaces to generate synthetic data, followed by large-scale imitation and reinforcement learning. This allows robots to refine their skills through millions of trials in a virtual world that obeys the laws of physics before deployment. This approach minimizes the “sim-to-real” gap, maximizing the transfer of learned behaviors to physical hardware.
The Technology Powering the Partnership
The integrated platform leverages distinct but interconnected technologies from both companies. Nvidia’s Physical AI stack is a multi-layered solution designed for the entire robotics development pipeline. It includes Nvidia Omniverse, a development platform for creating physically accurate, real-time 3D simulations and digital twins. Within this environment, tools like Isaac Sim are used for large-scale reinforcement learning, allowing AI models to learn complex tasks through trial and error in a safe, virtual setting. For training the foundational AI models, the stack relies on the immense computational power of systems like Nvidia’s DGX AI supercomputers. Once trained, these models are deployed for real-time inference on energy-efficient, on-robot computers such as the Nvidia Jetson series.
This powerful suite is integrated into Alibaba Cloud’s Platform for AI (PAI), an end-to-end managed service for AI development. PAI provides a comprehensive workbench that supports the entire machine learning lifecycle, from data annotation and model development to training and deployment. It is compatible with multiple open-source frameworks, including TensorFlow and PyTorch, and features over 140 built-in algorithm components for low-code, visual modeling. PAI’s elastic and scalable infrastructure is designed to handle large-scale distributed training tasks, allowing developers to dynamically configure computing resources to meet shifting demands, thereby optimizing both performance and cost.
Enterprise Adoption Across Industries
Alibaba Cloud’s AI platform is already demonstrating significant impact across various sectors, providing a preview of the capabilities the new partnership will enhance.
Pharmaceutical and Healthcare
In the pharmaceutical industry, AstraZeneca China is utilizing Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen large language model and Model Studio to create a next-generation tool for reporting adverse events. The AI-powered system has achieved 95% accuracy in its analysis of vast amounts of medical literature for drug safety reviews. Xin Zhong, Head of Commercial IT at AstraZeneca China, reported that this innovation has tripled the company’s operational efficiency in this critical process.
Cybersecurity and Retail
For the retail and beauty sector, Shiseido China has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to secure its digital operations. The company uses an AI-driven Cloud Threat Detection and Response platform to protect its infrastructure with real-time security analytics and expert threat hunting. Jerry Lin, the CITO of Shiseido China, emphasized that this partnership provides the confidence to scale the company’s digital transformation securely, allowing the team to focus on customer experiences while its cloud infrastructure is protected by advanced security measures.
AI Startups and Technology Firms
The platform is also a key enabler for startups. In Japan, marketing firm GladCube and financial tech company FLUX are leveraging Alibaba’s AI models to drive innovation in content creation and financial sector applications, respectively. Similarly, the firm Turbo AI partners with Alibaba Cloud to use its secure and resilient infrastructure for delivering tailored AI solutions. Yuan LU, Big Data Head of Turbo AI, noted that the platform’s intelligent resource scheduling and elastic computing allow the company to enhance operational efficiency and optimize cost-performance for its clients’ AI workloads.
