Alibaba Cloud to open 4 more data centres including Japan & Australia

By the end of 2016, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group, plans to open four new data centers in Dubai, Germany, Japan and Australia.

Marking the latest step in the unit's $1 billion infrastructure investment drive, four more data centers (the company already has two centers in the U.S) will help Alibaba to compete for a larger share of the cloud computing market outside China. The new centers are also expected to increase the current 2.3 million user base.

Alibaba Cloud’s expansion will provide customers across the world with improved latency and greater access to its diverse offerings, including data storage and analytics services, enterprise-level middleware, and cloud security services.

Though the unit has flourished domestically, according to the Reuters report, Alibaba cloud "accounts for a much smaller slice of the global market for cloud computing."

According to the research firm Canalys, the storage of data on remote networks rather than local servers is expected to reach $135 billion by 2020. Alibaba Cloud is forecasted to take 7.8 percent of that market, while leading players Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft, International Business Machines Corp and Alphabet Inc are expected to account for 69.1 percent.

Sicheng Yu, an Alibaba Group vice president and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global, said, "The new data centers will further expand Alibaba Cloud’s global ecosystem and footprint, allowing us to meet the increasing demand for secure and scalable cloud computing services from businesses and industries worldwide."

The company, "aims to establish cloud computing as the digital foundation for the new global economy using the opportunities of cloud computing to empower businesses of all sizes across all markets,” Alibaba Cloud President Simon Hu said.

The data center in Dubai has already started its initial operations in partnership with Dubai-based holding company Meraas. In Europe, the data centers will be launched in partnership with Vodafone. The Japanese data center is a joint venture with domestic operator SoftBank.

According to Yu, expect many more centers across the world. “We will open more data centers around the world, based on markets and customer response, that’s for sure,” he said.