According to Bloomberg, Ali Babayun Calculator plans to open its second AI data centre in Korea, located in the Korean Capital Circle, to be launched by the end of June 2025 to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence services and to counterbalance with global competitors such as Amazon and Microsoft.
In an interview with Eric Zhang, the General Manager of the Republic of Korea, Ali Baba, said that this expansion would double the company ‘ s ability to provide cloud services in Korea. The new data centre will focus on supporting artificial intelligence workloads, including training and reasoning for generating AI models. “The demand for AI services by Korean enterprises has multiplied, especially in the areas of finance, games and e-commerce”, zhang said. “Our new data centre will provide low-delayed, high-performance computing capacity to meet the strict requirements of the industry.”
According to Gartner, a market research company, global AI-related cloud service expenditures are expected to exceed $150 billion by 2025. Korea, as a technologically advanced market, with semiconductor giants such as Samsung electronics and SK Hercules, as well as a dynamic and fledgling enterprise ecosystem, is a critical battlefield for cloud service providers.
Aliyun entered the Korean market for the first time in 2016 and opened its first data centre in the Seoul region in 2020. Since then, cooperation has been established with local Korean enterprises, including KakaoPay, a financial technology company, and Netmarble, a game developer. Zhang indicated that the new data centre would further enhance Aliyun ‘ s ability to provide customized AI solutions for these clients.
At the same time, the Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure have been actively expanding in Korea. AWS announced in 2024 plans to invest $6 billion in new cloud infrastructure in Korea, while Microsoft committed $2 billion to AI and cloud services by 2025. By contrast, the pace of expansion in Ali Babayun was more cautious, but Zhang stressed that companies were focusing on providing cost-effective solutions to attract SMEs and start-ups.
Zhang said: “Our strategy is not simply to compete with AWS or Azure on a scale, we will compete differently through flexible pricing and localization of services, especially in helping clients optimize AI’s load. We believe that the great potential of the Korean market, particularly in the context of the AI-driven wave of digital transformation.”
The construction of the new data centre is expected to create hundreds of jobs for the local economy and will introduce renewable sources of energy in keeping with the commitment of the Ali Baba Group to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. Zhang also disclosed that Ali Babayun was exploring cooperation with the Korean telecommunications operator to further improve the speed and reliability of data transmission.
