China’s Alibaba targets data centres in bid to replace Amazon as cloud computing king by 2018,
Alibaba aims to invest in data centres in Asia, Dubai and parts of Europe over the next 18 months.
Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, will establish data centres in Asian countries such as India and Japan, parts of the Middle East and Europe over the next 18 months, Aliyun president Simon Hu said on Wednesday.
“The cloud business will be a very important sector for Alibaba,” Hu said in Beijing. “We hope to match or even surpass Amazon in three to four years.”
Aliyun collaborates with about 200 partner companies on data management and cloud computing services but hopes to grow this number to 2,000 by 2018, it said.
Hu also unveiled Aliyun’s data protection pact. He said customers could be assured of “absolute ownership” of their data, adding that Aliyun would not manipulate or transfer their cloud-based data.
The company said it analyses over 100 terabytes of information daily to check for security threats like malware.
However, it failed to address the sensitive issue of how it would respond to data requests from the Chinese government.
Alibaba’s latest quarterly earnings showed its cloud revenue stood at US$63 million, an 82 per cent increase from the same time last year.
Last month, Alibaba signed deals with seven firms so Aliyun can use their data centres to offer its cloud services abroad. Partners of the Marketplace Alliance Programme (MAP) include Intel, American data centre company Equinix and Hong Kong telecoms player PCCW.
It is also due to build a technology hub, including a data centre, in Dubai with Dubai-based real estate company Meraas Holding after the two formed a joint venture in May aimed partly at bolstering the emirate’s influence in the region.
This gives the Chinese company an edge in the region, which remains largely untapped by its American cloud computing rivals Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
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