After the Dakar Youth Olympic Games conclude, Alibaba Cloud wants to keep the event cloud in Africa and turn it into a national cloud

A competition has ended, but the story of a "national cloud" is just beginning.

On October 31, the 2026 Dakar Youth Olympic Games opened in Senegal, marking the first time the Olympic movement has come to Africa.

Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing and AI technical support for this sporting event, and has built Senegal's first dedicated Olympic cloud foundation to support event operations.

Relying on Alibaba Cloud's global data centers, audiences worldwide will be able to watch the athletes' outstanding performances through OBS Cloud broadcast; an AI drum performance created based on the video generation model Wanxiang also appeared at the opening ceremony.

According to Leiphone, in addition to cloud broadcasting, the core business systems of the Dakar Youth Olympic Games are all deployed on the dedicated Olympic cloud foundation that Alibaba Cloud built for this event, including applications such as event ticketing, registration, and schedule queries, as well as businesses such as event navigation and athlete services.

After the event ends, this "event cloud" will be handed over in its entirety to Senegal and converted into a "national cloud" platform to continue serving local digital transformation.

What a single event brings may be more than just a cloud service order. After the event ends, if this cloud can continue to operate and carry the business of local governments and enterprises, Alibaba Cloud will have the opportunity to further evolve from an event technical service provider into a participant in local digital infrastructure construction.

Local power and network conditions are not stable. To ensure the high availability of the cloud platform during the event, Alibaba Cloud's dedicated cloud team established a dual-AZ disaster recovery system in Senegal and conducted extensive drills.

In addition, considering possible bursts of traffic during the event, Alibaba Cloud also introduced public cloud CDN technology to alleviate bandwidth bottlenecks through a hybrid cloud architecture and improve the platform's elasticity.

But the delivery difficulties of overseas projects are not only technical architecture design, but also whether local personnel can truly master the technology, whether the infrastructure can support stable system operation, and whether timely response is possible in emergencies.

For example, in the early stage of the project, disaster recovery switching still relied relatively heavily on manual operations, and the on-site team needed repeated drills to gradually go from initially "being able to switch" to "daring to switch and knowing how to switch."

Beyond infrastructure, language and culture are also hurdles.

A typical example is that the term "public-private integrated," which domestic customers are familiar with, may not be understood by overseas customers if translated directly; but replacing it with expressions closer to the local technical cognitive system, such as "Cloud Native," makes communication much easier.

And from "event cloud" to "national cloud," there are also many challenges: who will operate the platform afterward, which customers it will serve, how it will obtain sustained revenue, and whether the local area has independent management capabilities all determine whether this cloud can truly stay.

"Teaching someone to fish is better than giving them a fish." In the view of Liu Guohua, Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group and General Manager of Dedicated Cloud, many African countries often have the willingness to embrace new technologies but lack the ability to use and operate technology.

Therefore, Alibaba Cloud hopes to help the local area establish capabilities for independent learning and operations and maintenance through local services, global 7×24 emergency support, and a training and certification system.

It can be seen that what Alibaba Cloud delivers is not just the cloud platform itself, but a complete set of technical capabilities and service systems—only if local teams can truly use, manage, and operate this system can this cloud possibly become long-term national-level infrastructure and benefit local digital construction over the long term.

Business share less than 5%, but resource investment nearly 50%

Compared with technical and delivery challenges, the business calculus of Alibaba Cloud's dedicated cloud international business may better illustrate the difficulty of this path.

Liu Guohua revealed that Alibaba Cloud's dedicated cloud international business achieved nearly 2x growth in the first half of the year, but currently still accounts for less than 5% of the overall business. In contrast, the resources invested in the international business have approached 50% of the entire department.

This means that Alibaba Cloud's current investment in dedicated cloud internationalization far exceeds its share of business revenue.

But this is a long-term business. Liu Guohua mentioned that overseas projects may take 2 to 3 years from contacting customers to actual implementation. Therefore, the international business cannot simply be measured by monthly KPIs, but needs to be viewed on an annual or even three-year cycle.

This differs from the relatively mature sales rhythm in the domestic market.

In China, customer needs, procurement processes, delivery teams, and service systems are relatively mature, and cloud vendors have relatively clear business cycles for organizing sales and delivery; but overseas, it often takes a long time in the early stage to build customer relationships, understand policies and the market environment, find local partners, and then gradually promote project implementation.

And signing the project is only the beginning. Local hardware procurement, personnel training, system deployment, and subsequent operations and maintenance may all lengthen the delivery cycle.

Therefore, the profit of the event itself is not the only goal. If the "event cloud" can become an entry point for Alibaba Cloud to participate in local digital infrastructure construction and gradually establish customer relationships and service capabilities, it is expected to drive more government and enterprise cloud business and open new growth space for dedicated cloud internationalization.

In the second year of the "Dual I" strategy, new space in overseas markets

For domestic cloud vendors, overseas markets are releasing new opportunities.

Last September, Alibaba Cloud released the Apsara Enterprise Edition "Dual I" strategy for the next decade—with AI (intelligence) as the technical direction and International as the market direction.

Although internationalization faces many localization challenges, it also breeds new market opportunities.

The domestic market is highly competitive and customer needs are complex, and cloud vendors have accumulated a large amount of technology and industry solutions through long-term practice; in some overseas markets where digital construction is still in an early stage, these capabilities are expected to find new room for implementation.

"Many solutions that are rejected in China may be very competitive internationally." Liu Guohua took the Cambodian market as an example: local 5G construction and digital transformation are still in their infancy, while China's relatively mature solutions such as digital government and city brains may be more competitive in some overseas markets.

Entering the second year of the "Dual I" strategy, the way Alibaba Cloud participates in overseas markets is also changing: it is no longer limited to providing cloud resources, deploying systems, or completing single project deliveries, but has begun to participate in local cloud platforms and digital infrastructure construction, and through technical support, talent training, and local services, help customers build long-term operational capabilities.

But from an "event cloud" to a "national cloud" that can truly operate sustainably, there is still a long way to go. For Alibaba Cloud, internationalization is more like a long-term layout that requires investment in advance and patient waiting.

This article is original by Leiphone. The author focuses on big tech AI To B. You are welcome to add the author's WeChat skylar_12_14 for exchange and discussion.