Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese tech group Alibaba, announced on Thursday (27) that it will install two data centers in Brazil, the company's first in the country. According to Folha de S.Paulo, the data processing complexes will anchor Alibaba's newly launched cloud infrastructure operation for South America, headquartered in Brazilian territory.
The company did not disclose how much it will invest in Brazil. It said only that the spending is part of a global commitment of US$ 53 billion (about R$ 273 billion) in artificial intelligence infrastructure. It also gave no date for the start of its AI-focused operation in South America.
On the supply side, Alibaba Cloud arrives as the largest provider of computing infrastructure as a service in China, holding more than 30% of its home market, ahead of Huawei and Tencent, according to data from consultancy Omdia cited by Folha. The Brazilian move follows a regional expansion that has already taken the company to Mexico, France, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. On the demand side, potential customers are companies that rent processing and storage capacity to run systems and train AI models, a market currently contested in Brazil by AWS, Microsoft and Google.
Qwen models as the calling card
The commercial push leans on the Qwen family of open-source models. According to Folha, Qwen 3.8-Flash, with 3.8 billion parameters, ranks among the three most used and praised models on Hugging Face, a platform where developers combine open technologies to build new products, and is priced below the services of American rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. The most advanced version, with 2.4 trillion parameters, also performs well in benchmark tests, although analysts quoted by the newspaper note that Chinese models are often trained to maximize results on those benchmarks.
For Brazilian companies that buy cloud capacity, the arrival of one more global provider tends to widen the fight for corporate contracts and could pressure processing and storage prices at a time when demand for AI capacity is growing. For end consumers, the effect is indirect: any cost reduction reaches their pockets only if the companies renting this infrastructure pass the savings on to the digital services they sell.