Alibaba Cloud to invest $28 bn in infrastructure

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group on Monday announced that it will invest an additional $28 billion in the next three years on its infrastructure.

Hangzhou, China-based company will focus on technologies including operating systems, servers, chips and networks and expects to deploy its technologies in the next-generation data centres in the coming years.

Alibaba Cloud has data centres in 63 availability zones, two of which are in India, across 21 regions serving customers across the globe. It has more than 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide.

Read: Alibaba Cloud offers AI, cloud services in fight against Covid-19

The investment, at least in part, has been prompted by companies adopting work from home model as well as an increase in demand for cloud services. “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,” Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence said in a statement.

Alibaba recently partnered with Mumbai-based ZNet Technologies for the distribution of its cloud infrastructure and managed services in India. The partnership between Alibaba Cloud and ZNet is expected to bring the $500 billion giant's cloud products and solutions into the country.

According to Gartner’s Market Share Report 2018, Alibaba Cloud was the Asia Pacific market leader for IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and IUS (Infrastructure Utility Services) with a 19.6% market share. 

Globally, the company competes with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud among others.