At the Apsara 2026 conference Alibaba said the next Qwen generation is in training, and the Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 series are planned to reach 5 to 10 trillion parameters. Its cloud plans new regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands in the next 12 months. Everything with a future date is a plan.
- The new regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands are a plan for the next 12 months; Alibaba Cloud now has 107 zones in 31 regions.
- The target is more than 20 gigawatts of data centre capacity by 2032.
- Per the company, Qwen3.8-Max went through 33 cycles of automated self-improvement in a month and raised its score from 40 to 45.
Two new EU countries are entering the plans of a Chinese cloud. That is the news for Europe from Apsara, not the trillions of parameters.
Germany and France are already on their map, and there Alibaba is only expanding its data centres. For a European company using Qwen through Alibaba's cloud, more regions in the EU mean more choice about where the data sits and an easier conversation with the lawyers.
The number I would not stand on
Thirty-three cycles of self-improvement and five points up in a month. It sounds like exactly what Altman warned the Security Council about a day earlier.
But it is given in a single sentence, with no method, no word on what exactly improved or who checked. The Artificial Analysis score is external, but the road to it is described only by Alibaba. Until there is a report, this is an advert with a science word in it.
The European regions can be checked: in a year they will either be in their console or not. That is the date worth writing down.