Alibaba Cloud opens a new cloud region in Johor

Alibaba Cloud last week announced the launch of a new public cloud region in Johor, anchored by two new data centres.

In its press release, the company framed this as part of its US$53 billion investment plan to expand its global infrastructure to 104 availability zones across 32 regions.

Agents included

Apart from offering the compute, storage, networking and other building blocks for cloud-native services, Alibaba Cloud says it will also offer a suite of agentic AI services.

These include, among others, an agent development and build platform, hardware-level security isolation for AI agents, and an AI agent-driven security operations platform.

I've previously written about Alibaba Cloud, which was among the first cloud providers to build cloud regions in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. The Johor region continues that early-mover pattern across Southeast Asia.

Cloud's quiet comeback

Interest in public cloud providers has faded slightly since the advent of AI, yet their role in powering the AI era has never been stronger.

Some of the leading AI giants, such as Anthropic, make heavy use of AI infrastructure from cloud giants such as Google and AWS for training and inferencing. And as AI accelerates coding and app creation, the cloud offers crucial components that a new wave of apps need in order to be created, deployed, and scaled rapidly.

Finally, public cloud providers themselves host an extremely rich array of AI models, even as they roll out an increasingly diverse mix of AI capabilities.

Which raises the real question behind this launch: is the public cloud quietly becoming the most important layer of the AI stack?