Alibaba announced plans to invest 200 billion yuan (US$28 billion) into its cloud computing business over the next three years to speed up the digitization of businesses in China following the Covid-19 outbreak in the country.
The Chinese tech giant said in a statement that it plans to use the funds on semiconductor, operating system, and server development, as well as bolster its data center infrastructure.
Photo credit: caoyuan73 / 123RF
“The Covid-19 pandemic has posed additional stress on the overall economy across sectors, but it also steers us to put more focus on the digital economy,” said Alibaba Cloud Intelligence president Jeff Zhang, adding that the increased investment will hopefully speed up the recovery process for businesses.
Alibaba Cloud also said that it expects its self-developed technologies to be largely deployed on next-generation data centers in the coming years. Currently, the company has data centers in 63 availability zones across 21 regions, as well as 70 security and compliance accreditations globally.
As of the fourth quarter of 2019, Alibaba Cloud commands 46.4% of the Chinese cloud market, according to research firm Canalys. However, it faces rising competition from rivals Tencent and Baidu, which have 18% and 8.8% market shares, respectively.
While Alibaba stands as the biggest cloud computing provider in its home country by market share, it still trails behind US-based rivals Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud globally as of Q4 2019, according to market research firm Synergy Research.
Editing by Charmaine de Lazo
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