Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group’s digital technology and intelligence arm, launched new initiatives to accelerate AI use and Malaysia’s digital transformation.
According to the company, enhanced talent training for startups and rural areas, an upgraded AI-focused collaboration program, and the latest AI platform will boost AI adoption and accelerate Malaysia’s digital transformation and innovation roadmap.
Following its May announcement to establish the third data centre in Malaysia within three years, this step shows Alibaba Cloud’s commitment to localisation.
The “Digital Accelerator Program” by Alibaba Cloud aims to promote local talent AI and tech literacy by developing an extended, enhanced, and inclusive ecosystem with investment, training, and technical assistance.
“As a leading cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud is actively fostering a digital transformation ecosystem that will pave the way for the nation’s digital roadmap,” said Kun Huang, General Manager of South Asia Pacific (APAC), Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. By empowering startups, partners, and rural communities with AI-driven digital training and cutting-edge technology platform, we are committed to propelling cloud and AI technology forward and nurturing homegrown digital talents, This is the core of our strategy to ignite innovation and usher in a smarter and more efficient Malaysia driven by digital technology,” he added.
Notably, Alibaba Cloud has taught over 20,000 individuals in cloud capabilities since 2017, demonstrating its commitment to upskilling Malaysian nationals.
The Digital Accelerator Program describes its future commitments and objectives in three major pillars, namely startup catalysts, future talents training, and independent software vendor (ISV) growth, as part of a continuing effort to support the country’s digitalisation.
By the end of 2025, Alibaba Cloud hopes to have trained and certified over 500 Malaysian companies through this initiative.
Up to $120,000 in cash and resources will be given to qualified firms to help them succeed in their digitalisation efforts.
Expanding on the fruitful partnership with Universiti Malaya, the project aims to open Alibaba Cloud Academy Skills Centres by 2025 in a minimum of five Malaysian universities. These centres will provide educators and students with complimentary access to digital resources, specialising in areas like data analytics, cybersecurity, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and more.
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By doing this, Alibaba Cloud will be able to meet its target of 10,000 certified students by the end of 2025. Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud is dedicated to fostering 10,000 community students by offering extended digital training to rural areas in Selangor, Johor, Penang, Sarawak, and Sabah.
Cloud knowledge, especially GenAI, will be taught to 50 independent software vendors (ISVs). Alibaba Cloud and the ISVs intend to help 1,000 SMEs digitalize this year by developing an AI-driven ecosystem.
Alibaba Cloud has also made Model Studio, its proprietary generative AI development platform, available to foreign customers through its Singapore availability zones to meet Malaysia’s expanding AI adoption trends.
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Malaysian users can access Alibaba Cloud’s huge language model Qwen family, encompassing closed-source and open-source models with multimodal capabilities and 0.5 billion to several hundred billion parameters, through Model Studio. This will enable Malaysian industry to design custom generative AI applications.
Alibaba Cloud, a leading cloud service provider, has 89 availability zones in 30 regions worldwide and provides a secure, scalable, robust cloud infrastructure to support global customers embracing digital innovation while being sustainable.
Since 2017, Alibaba Cloud has become the first global cloud provider with twin local data centres in Malaysia and launched its first cloud-based Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Centre in 2018. Alibaba Cloud, founded in 2009, powers Alibaba Group’s digital technologies and intelligence.
Elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualisation, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning, and AI are among its global cloud offerings.
