Bangkok, December 22, 2025 - Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner(R) Magic Quadrant(TM) for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS) for the sixth consecutive year.
The report defines the cloud DBMS market as "software products that store and manipulate data" and which are "primarily delivered as platform as a service (PaaS) in the cloud." Cloud DBMS vendors were analyzed based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
Alibaba Cloud was recognised for its comprehensive cloud-native capabilities including its serverless support across all proprietary DBMS products as well as the innovative three-layer decoupled compute-memory-storage architecture of PolarDB. Through its data and AI platform covering infrastructure, cloud platforms, DBMS, multimodal data management, AI engineering and large language models (LLMs), Alibaba Cloud is among the few hyper-scaler vendors that provides data+AI solutions to empower customers to develop and deploy applications with first-party only components.
"We are accelerating towards the open integration and convergence of data and AI. In the era of Agentic AI, Alibaba Cloud Database ApsaraDB is evolving from a cloud-native data foundation to an 'AI-ready' multimodal data foundation, enhancing cloud-native capabilities, multimodal data management, and deeper AI-model integration." said Dr. Feifei Li, President of Database Products, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, "We are honored to be named a Leader for the sixth consecutive year, and we are thrilled to help customers unlock the value of data + AI."
According to "Innovation Insight: Database Management Systems for Enterprise AI Agents" by Gartner, spending on database management systems (DBMSs) with embedded generative AI capabilities is expected to triple by 2028. This growth reflects the increasing importance of modern DBMSs in dynamically capturing data for AI agent development and model training.
Supporting customers with cloud-native, AI-ready data solutionsAlibaba Cloud's database solutions have been adopted globally across industries such as finance, internet, media, automotive, and retail, as well as in emerging AI-driven applications. By providing an AI-ready, multimodal data foundation, these solutions empower leading enterprises to accelerate their Data + AI innovation.
Li Auto, a leading Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, has built the memory mechanism for its intelligent cockpit using Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native multimodal database Lindorm and Tair, a high-performance in-memory database. This integrated solution leverages Tair for real-time contextual feature processing and fast vector retrieval, while Lindorm provides a unified engine to store and manage massive volume of diverse data types — including text, vectors, wide-column, time-series, and spatial data. The system achieves a recall accuracy of up to 99.5% with an average query latency of just 2 milliseconds.
Manulife, a leading global insurer, has migrated the legacy data system for its Hong Kong operations to Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native database PolarDB. The migration maintained operational continuity while substantially reducing migration and ongoing maintenance costs. With PolarDB, Manulife has deployed a multi-cloud architecture with cross-availability zone and cross-cloud disaster recovery capabilities to strengthen business resilience. Also, PolarDB Serverless further enables elastic auto-scaling, allowing the system to efficiently handle traffic spikes and improve resource utilization.
AstraZeneca China, a global biopharmaceutical company focused on science-led innovation, collaborated with Alibaba Cloud to build an adverse event reporting tool in China that can help human reviewers in pharmaceutical companies identify relevant literature and generate detailed reports for adverse drug events, a crucial step in ensuring drug safety.
Trained on a vast number of medical publications and scientific papers and finetuned with annotated customized dataset, Alibaba Cloud helped AstraZeneca build a proprietary vertical model in the medical field with a more profound insight of the domain. The platform adopted Alibaba Cloud's AnalyticDB vector engine within its enterprise-grade RAG architecture, efficiently integrating AstraZeneca's medical knowledge bases with Alibaba Cloud's LLM, Qwen, via Model Studio Exclusive. By using this streamlined platform, AstraZeneca has successfully achieved a 300% increase in reporting efficiency, along with an improvement in report accuracy from 90% to 95%. The pioneering solution empowers researchers to efficiently integrate data with AI, unlocking deep value and enhancing patient safety.
As demand for intelligent, scalable, and integrated data infrastructure continues to surge, Alibaba Cloud remains committed to redefining what cloud databases can achieve in the AI era. With a proven record of innovation, global scalability, and deep convergence of data and AI capabilities, Alibaba Cloud is well-positioned to help organizations worldwide unlock the full value of their data.
Last month, Alibaba Cloud has been recognized as an Emerging Leader In the four latest November 2025Gartner(R) "Innovation Guide for Generative AI" for "Generative AI Specialized Cloud Infrastructure", "Generative AI Model Providers", "Generative AI Engineering", and "Generative AI Knowledge Management Apps" reports. Alibaba Cloud believes that being recognized as an Emerging Leader across the GenAI stack is a powerful validation of its integrated 'AI + Cloud' strategy.
