On January 20, 2026, during the Aliyun PolarDB Developer Conference, Aliyun made a significant announcement. Its cloud - native database, PolarDB, has officially rolled out a range of new AI features, with the 'AI Data Lake Database (Lakebase)' taking center stage.

This groundbreaking innovation goes beyond just storing and querying multimodal data. It has the capability to directly fuel AI - driven intelligent decision - making. The PolarDB AI Data Lake Database is meticulously crafted to implement an 'integrated lake and database' architecture. This architecture effectively dismantles traditional data silos, ensuring consistent and unified access to full - modality data. Moreover, it offers cache acceleration to guarantee the efficient flow of massive amounts of data.

In addition, through the seamless integration of a multimodal engine and In - DB model operatorization, developers can carry out semantic retrieval and reasoning processing directly within the database. This not only boosts efficiency but also ensures compliance with data privacy regulations.

Aliyun also, for the first time, elaborated on the four core pillars of an 'AI - ready database.' These include multimodal AI data lake databases, efficient fused search capabilities, model operatorization services, and backend services for Agent application development.

At present, PolarDB has been deployed with over 3 million cores, spanning 86 availability zones across the globe. It has been scaled up for use in various sectors, such as finance, automotive, and government affairs.