Alibaba Cloud to inject $28 billion into cloud infrastructure

APAC cloud king says more infrastructure needed to  expedite Covid-19 business recovery

Alibaba has announced plans to plough $28 billion into its cloud division over the next three years following a surge in demand for cloud services that assist remote working.

The majority of the investment will be used to expand Alibaba Cloud’s operating system and the servers and chips needed for its data centres. The provider currently has 63 availability zones, located in Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

Alibaba Cloud dominates the Asia Pacific cloud market, where Gartner has ranked it as the leading cloud player for the last three years.

The provider has its eyes on the global market however, where it’s steadily eating up ground on Amazon, Google and Microsoft. According to IDC,  Alibaba’s cloud division recorded the fastest growth of all other global cloud service providers in the first half of last year, posting a 62 percent revenue increase in the last quarter.

“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 Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

“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,” Zhang added.

Over the past decade, Alibaba Cloud has developed its proprietary technologies including the Apsara Distributed Operating System, AI-inference chip Hanguang 800, X-dragon Architecture, RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) high-speed network, Super Computing Cluster and leading network devices such as VSwitch.