Indonesia's GoTo Group is overhauling its IT backbone to become a scalable, AI-first company while ensuring full compliance with local data sovereignty laws, with the help of Alibaba Cloud.
GoTo Financial’s core applications were first transitioned to Alibaba Cloud, followed by the migration of its workloads to Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB and Tair database solutions. The group’s core business intelligence data platform was also shifted to Alibaba Cloud’s MaxCompute.
“A secure, scalable foundation is a key pillar to our AI strategy because we need to have high-quality data that enables us to make the right decision. Migrating to Alibaba Cloud’s MaxCompute helps us with that, enhancing the scalability, resilience and cost efficiency of our data platform. Meanwhile, our lending systems can now deliver high-performance and ultra-low latency services, thanks to PolarDB and Tair,” shares William Xiong, group chief technology officer of GoTo Group, at a media roundtable on the sidelines of Alibaba Cloud Global Summit in Singapore on July 2.
The seamless transition was completed in less than a year without any disruption to the business. The two teams leveraged Alibaba Cloud’s Landing Zone and Terraform to achieve a 100% Infrastructure as Code deployment, laying a stable foundation for thousands of microservices. Furthermore, the adoption of a “dual-core” architecture allowed for a gradual traffic migration to Alibaba Cloud and ensured uninterrupted business service during the complex migration.
According to Xiong, half of GoTo’s IT foundation has been moved to Alibaba Cloud so far, with more systems set to follow.
“Migrating to the cloud has enabled us to clean up a lot of our services and simplify our overall IT architecture, making it more modular to support scalability. We have also put in shared capabilities like big data processing using MaxCompute and a unified multi-cloud management system. This empowers our business lines and six development centres around the region to operate more cohesively,” he adds.
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By moving all its data to Alibaba Cloud’s Indonesia-based data centres, GoTo is able to fully comply with local data sovereignty, privacy and protection regulations.
The cloud provider’s open platform also enables GoTo to use Sahabat AI — a large language model (LLM) developed by GoTo and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison specifically for Bahasa Indonesia and local dialects – in its chatbot. While Sahabat AI is its core model, GoTo remains open to integrating third-party LLMs as needed.
Helping to fast-track enterprise AI
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At the same event, Alibaba Cloud launched its first AI Global Competency Center (AIGCC) in Singapore to help more enterprises become AI-ready.
The centre will provide more than 5,000 businesses and 100,000 developers with access to advanced AI models, computing resources, curated datasets, and pre-built AI agents tailored to sectors such as finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy.
The centre also aims to co-develop AI solutions with over 1,000 companies and start-ups.
As part of the initiative, Alibaba Cloud aims to train 100,000 AI professionals annually in partnership with over 120 universities worldwide.
The launch comes as Alibaba Cloud rolls out a series of upgrades to make it easier and faster for companies to work with AI models.
One key feature is “One Channel For AI” in its real-time Data Transmission Service (DTS), which simplifies the preparation of different types of data (such as documents, images, and videos) for AI applications. The feature automatically converts both structured and unstructured data into a format suitable for use in vector databases, which are essential for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
RAG enhances the accuracy and relevance of AI responses by first searching a trusted database for context before generating an answer. By automating the data preparation process for RAG, businesses can build LLM-powered applications faster and with less technical effort.
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Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud has upgraded its Platform for AI (PAI) to support more advanced AI models and large-scale deployments. The improvements, which are focused on its Elastic Algorithm Service, allow businesses to run complex models like Mixture of Experts (MoE) more efficiently and at scale.
Popularised by DeepSeek, MoE models are designed to improve accuracy and speed by activating only the most relevant “experts” within a large model for each task, instead of using the entire network. This makes them ideal for powering more context-aware chatbots and enterprise AI tools with faster response times and lower computing costs.
With these enhancements, PAI can now process over 15,000 tokens (words or characters) per second with Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen3- 235B LLM, while keeping delays to under 50 milliseconds. This is crucial for businesses looking to deploy AI at scale without sacrificing user experience or budget.
To support growing AI demand in Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud launched its third data centre in Malaysia earlier this month and will open a second in the Philippines by October. These follow earlier expansions into Thailand, Mexico and South Korea, reinforcing the company’s bid to power AI workloads globally.
“Alibaba Cloud is committed to supporting businesses to succeed by enabling them to use AI and cloud technologies to enhance customer experience (whether by improving customer loyalty or offering value-added services), increase operational efficiency and drive business growth,” says Selina Yuan, president of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, at the media roundtable.
Enabling green AI and partners
Alongside its infrastructure push, Alibaba Cloud is sharpening its focus on sustainability.
A global study Alibaba commissioned to Forrester Consulting reveals that 84% of leaders with an AI sustainability vision see green AI as a business priority. Yet 69% remain at the beginner stage, citing challenges such as a lack of sustainably sourced AI hardware, inefficient energy usage in data centres, and limited in-house expertise.
In response, Alibaba Cloud has expanded its Energy Expert platform with a new AI-powered ESG reporting tool.
Built on Alibaba’s proprietary Qwen model, the tool helps businesses streamline the complex process of ESG disclosure through guided reporting, automated content creation, actionable insights and real-time collaboration.
It is designed to support alignment with major international standards including the International Sustainability Standards Board, Global Reporting Initiative, and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board.
By enabling traceable data lineage and centralising record-keeping, the tool helps companies reduce compliance costs and improve audit readiness.
Besides that, Alibaba Cloud plans to invest more than US$60 million ($76.6 million) this fiscal year to strengthen its global partner ecosystem and accelerate AI adoption. The funding will go toward joint marketing campaigns, incentive rebate programmes and training initiatives aimed at driving shared growth with its network of partners.
“Our partners are the catalysts for customer success, and this significant investment is a testament to our commitment to a shared growth model,” says Raymond Ma, vice president of Global Partners & Alliances at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
He adds that by equipping partners with advanced resources, incentives and access to its Qwen large language models, the company aims to foster a “synergistic ecosystem” to speed up digital transformation and unlock new business opportunities globally in the AI era.
