Alibaba Invests £640m In Cloud Computing

Alibaba is stepping up its cloud computing game with a $1 billion (£640m) investment in the technology.

According to a news report by Business Insider, the company has thus become more of a competitor to Amazon, Google and Microsoft than ever before.

The funding will be used to expand Aliyun’s international presence, extend its alliance-based ecosystem, and to build new products that it can offer at lower costs, the company announced in a press release.

This is the second time in two months that we’ve been reporting on Alibaba’s cloud efforts. Just last month, the Chinese e-retailer announced a new partnership with Equinix, which operates more than 105 data centres around the world.

The stated goal is to make it easier for multi-national corporations in the U.S. to conduct business in China and vice versa.

In March Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing arm, opened its first stateside data centre in the States, at an undisclosed Silicon Valley site while Amazon opened up its first data centre in China in late 2013.

All of this aligns with what Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said recently, that the company must expand globally if it wants to survive.

In a speech given to employees in May, the new Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said Alibaba will heavily invest in “new and existing overseas operations“.

In his speech, Zhang said he wants to recruit talent from other countries and adopt “global thinking.” If the company can’t globalise, then Alibaba won’t last, he said. “We need to have global talent,” he said.