Alibaba Cloud has opened its third data center in South Korea, accelerating local infrastructure expansion as demand for artificial intelligence and cloud services grows faster than the company had expected. The new Seoul facility strengthens disaster recovery and service resilience by allowing workloads to be spread across three sites rather than two, helping reduce single point of failure risk and supporting a service level agreement for the Korea region of 99.99%, up from 99.95%. Alibaba Cloud said the investment is intended to help domestic companies run AI- and cloud-based services more stably, while also expanding enterprise AI offerings including AI agents through what it describes as an end-to-end AI full stack covering infrastructure, models, platforms and applications. The company has said customer data stored in the Korea region will not be transferred overseas without consent, underscoring data sovereignty and compliance with domestic rules. The launch forms part of Alibaba's broader global AI and cloud investment plan of about 75 trillion won, or roughly $54 billion, over three years, and brings Alibaba Cloud's global network to 30 regions and 104 availability zones. The company is also promoting its open-source AI strategy around its Qwen large language model family, while targeting South Korean enterprises with lower-cost cloud and AI infrastructure than U.S. hyperscalers. Entry into South Korea's public cloud market remains undecided because Cloud Security Assurance Program approval would be required.