Alibaba Cloud has kept a region in Dubai since 2016. Meramia is the firm down the road that runs yours.
We sign the contract in the UAE, invoice you in dirhams, move your systems into the Dubai zones and look after them once they are there.
- Drawing
- 01 · Region me-east-1, Dubai
- Shows
- Two zones; private links in at four points
- Source
- Alibaba Cloud documentation
- Checked
- 25 Sep 2026 · schematic, not to scale
Partner · UAEContracts and invoices
from Meramia Technologies LTD
In November 2016 Alibaba Cloud switched on a data centre in Dubai, the first public cloud region anywhere in the Middle East.1 Nearly ten years later the region has two zones, a second data centre opened at GITEX in October 2025,2 and a certificate from the Dubai Electronic Security Center that lets government bodies use it.3
For a company with a room of servers and no cloud engineer, most of that is background. The questions that matter are plainer: who signs the contract, who moves the systems, and who picks up when something fails. At Meramia the answer to all three is the same team, based in Dubai.
- 1Alibaba Group, announcement of initial operations with YVOLV, 21 November 2016.
- 2Alibaba Cloud press room and the Dubai Government Media Office, 14 October 2025.
- 3Alibaba Cloud Trust Center, DESC CSP page, retrieved 25 September 2026. DESC's standard governs cloud services for Dubai government and semi-government entities.
What we do, in the order we do it
The contract and the bill
You buy Alibaba Cloud through Meramia Technologies LTD. The invoice comes from us once a month, in dirhams, with VAT set out as UAE rules require, and partner pricing is applied wherever your usage qualifies.
You receive: one invoice a month, in AEDAn honest inventory
Before anything moves, we write down what you have: every server, database and scheduled job, and what leans on what. Each item is matched to a service that exists in Dubai today. Anything without a home there is named on the first page.
You receive: a written assessmentThe move
Systems move in an agreed order, a few at a time. Every move has a way back, and we rehearse it beforehand, so that a bad night ends with the old system still running.
You receive: a runbook for each workloadThe daily work
Once you are in Dubai we keep the estate patched and backed up, watch its capacity and take the call when something fails. You will know the engineer by name, and the response times are written into the contract.
You receive: a named engineerThe monthly reckoning
Each month we lay what you paid beside what you used. Idle machines, oversized databases and forgotten snapshots go on a short list with their cost, and you decide what stays.
You receive: a cost note each month
What runs in Dubai today
Not everything Alibaba sells is offered in its Dubai region. We checked each service against Alibaba's own documentation, and we list the gaps with the same care as the rest.
Model Studio, the Qwen API, is not offered in the UAE. Where a model has to run inside the country, we serve an open model on PAI-EAS in Dubai instead.
- Source
- Alibaba Cloud product documentation
- Checked
- 25 Sep 2026 · re-checked each quarter
- ●Elastic Compute Servicevirtual servers · both zones
- ●Container Service for KubernetesPro, dedicated and serverless clusters
- ●Elastic Container Instancezone A
- ●Object Storage · File Storage NASregion-wide
- ●ApsaraDB RDS · Tairrelational and Redis-compatible · both zones
- ●Data Transmission Service · Elasticsearchmigration and search
- ●Application Load Balancer · CENboth zones
- ●Express Connectfour Dubai access points
- ●WAF 3.0 · Anti-DDoS Basic · Cloud Firewallsecurity at the edge of the region
- ●PAI · EAS and AI Workspacemodel serving in Dubai
- ○GPU instances · PolarDB · KMSnot stated in public documentation; we check your account
- ✕Model Studio, the Qwen APInot offered in the UAE
A server in Dubai is half of the answer
Keeping data inside the Emirates is sometimes a preference and sometimes the law. Three rules come up more than any others, and each binds the owner of the data rather than the company that hosts it.
- The Personal Data Protection Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021, in force since 2 January 2022. Its executive regulations have still not been issued.u.ae · Chambers & Partners, 2026
- For banks, the Central Bank's outsourcing regulation keeps the main system of record, and the confidential data in it, inside the UAE.CBUAE Rulebook · Article 6.1
- For health data, Federal Law No. 2 of 2019 forbids storage or transfer outside the country without approval.Article 13 · Latham & Watkins summary
Our part is to build your account so that meeting these rules is ordinary, and to tell you in writing whenever a service would carry data abroad.
General information, not legal adviceTwo ways to buy the same cloud
Directly from Alibaba
You hold the account, pay Alibaba's invoice and raise tickets with Alibaba's support. The migration and the daily running are your own team's work, which suits companies that already employ cloud engineers.
Through Meramia
The contract and the invoice are with Meramia Technologies LTD, in the UAE. We move the systems, run them and take the first call. When the fault sits inside Alibaba, we raise it through the partner channel and stay on it until it is closed.
Where to begin
With the bill alone, if your team already runs Alibaba Cloud and wants a UAE contract and an invoice in dirhams.
With a move, if your systems sit on your own servers or another cloud and you want them in Dubai.
With all of it, if you would rather not run infrastructure at all.
Whichever you choose, the price is set out in a written proposal after the assessment, in dirhams.
Asked first, answered plainly
Will our data stay in the UAE?
Data you keep in me-east-1 is held in Alibaba's Dubai data centres. If a service in your design would process data elsewhere, the assessment says so before anything moves.
Who sends the invoice?
Meramia Technologies LTD, once a month, in dirhams, with UAE VAT shown.
Can you move us from AWS or Azure?
Yes. The assessment maps each service you use to its nearest equivalent in Dubai, and names the ones that have none before the plan is agreed.
Can we run AI models in Dubai?
Model serving on PAI-EAS runs in the Dubai region. Model Studio, the hosted Qwen API, does not. So an open model served on EAS keeps the work in the country; a call to Model Studio leaves it.
Send us a list of what you run
A spreadsheet, a network diagram or a paragraph will do. We read it, ask what we need to, and come back with a written assessment.
Thank you. We have your note.