Alibaba Cloud has seen significant cloud and data center services demand growth in China lately, boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this growth, Alibaba Cloud has decided to invest more than $28 billion in its cloud infrastructure over the next three years.
Alibaba has planned to build more cloud-based data centers to complement its existing cloud computing network of data centers, currently offering 63 availability zones covering 21 regions worldwide. The company intends to increase the number of data centers to offer cloud services in even more countries. The investment of more than $28 million would equal around half of Alibaba Group’s overall turnover in 2019.
Cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing business areas for Alibaba, along with e-commerce and Internet gaming. Its main competitors include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Baidu, and Tencent Cloud.
COVID-19 and Cloud
The market for cloud providers like Alibaba is considered to be particularly lucrative during this corona crisis, as the global data volume has increased due to more video conferences being held, while also Internet trade is flourishing now. Next to that, video games and other applications are increasingly running in the cloud.
Part of Alibaba’s investment sum in its cloud infrastructure is going towards the expansion of new technologies such as the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Alibaba Cloud recently announced the provisioning of various AI tools free of charge to medical staff and researchers – to support the global fight against the COVID-19 Coronavirus. These tools are intended to provide faster diagnoses and more data-based analytics and insights.
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