Chinese tech giant Alibaba has announced a fresh investment of RMB 200 billion (~$28 billion) in its cloud computing division. The funds will be used to improve the infrastructure over the course of the next 3 years amid a surge in demand for business software and online services like video conferencing and live streaming, Alibaba says.
The ongoing pandemic has forced people to work from home, and as a result, data centers and cloud computing services has seen a major spike in user traffic. Alibaba says the focus of the latest investment will be operating system and semiconductor development, as well as improving its data center infrastructure to cater to the increased user traffic given work from home seems here to stay, for the time being at least.
In a press statement, Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and chief technology officer of Alibaba Group, said, “By increasing our investment on cloud infrastructure and fundamental technologies, we hope to continue providing world-class, trusted computing resources to help businesses speed up the recovery process, and offer cloud-based intelligent solutions to support their digital transformation in the post-pandemic world.”
Alibaba currently has 63 cloud regions, located in Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. The cloud computing division is one of the best-performing ones for Alibaba, with fourth-quarter revenue climbing 62% to 10.7 billion Yuan. The division also accounted for 46.4% of China’s cloud market for the fourth quarter last year, followed by rivals Tencent and Baidu, holding 18% and 8.8% of market share respectively.
