Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms Q4 2024 report. Alibaba Cloud believes this designation recognises its depth of its cloud and AI offerings and strategy, its significant global presence, as well as the ability to provide its global customers with a wide range of products and services. This is the first time Alibaba Cloud has been recognised as a Leader among other significant public cloud platform providers in this report. 

Alibaba Cloud is named one of four leaders among nine global vendors evaluated in Forrester’s report, with the 2nd  highest scores in the current offering and strategy categories. The report states that Alibaba Cloud showed its capacity for AI innovation with homegrown AI models, breadth of foundation model choices and model-as-a-service (MaaS) innovation. The report also states that the core infrastructure and model-as-a-service capabilities enable Alibaba Cloud to provide a major model repository for AI across China. 

“Alibaba has upped the ante on serverless beyond AI, packaging its powerful cloud-native infrastructure into more accessible offerings for both developers and operators, with data and analytics as a stand out,” said Forrester in the report. “Alibaba is a good fit for Chinese-based enterprises or international corporations requiring cloud scale across APAC and parts of Africa, Europe, and Latin America,” the report added.

The Forrester report is a 30-criterion evaluation of the nine most significant public cloud platform providers. Each provider is evaluated on the strengths of their current offerings, strategy and market presence. Alibaba Cloud has achieved the highest possible assessment score (5.0 out of 5.0) in 17 criteria, including database, data integration and governance services, container and Kubernetes services, serverless/FaaS services, compute, IoT, storage services as well as AI development services. 

“Expanding our cloud-native infrastructure and AI capabilities in the public cloud space to better support our clients is a top priority. We are honoured to be recognised by Forrester for our efforts in this critical area,” said Jingren Zhou, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “To address the increasing demands of AI, we are dedicated to continuously enhancing our ability to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable cloud products and AI applications to our customers.”

At Apsara Conference 2024, Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship event hosted in September, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a revamped full-stack infrastructure designed to meet the growing demands for robust AI computing. It also released over 100 of its newly-launched large language models, Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community. Qwen, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large language model, has seen significant adoption since its introduction in April 2023. The Qwen models have been downloaded over 40 million times on open-source platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope, and have inspired the creation of more than 78,000 derivative models.

As a creator of the MaaS concept and an advocate of open source, Alibaba Cloud also built ModelScope, China’s biggest AI model community. It hosts over 10,000 models and serves more than 8 million developers. 

On the global presence, Alibaba Cloud continues to expand its global reach, currently operating 85 data centres in 28 regions globally. In May 2024, Alibaba Cloud announced its plan to launch its first cloud region in Mexico, and to establish additional data centres in its key markets including Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea in the next three years.