Alibaba to invest Dollars 1 bln in Aliyun cloud-computing unit

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

Right now, cloud computing only constitutes a small chunk of Alibaba’s .8 billion in revenue last quarter, but this new investment prove Aliyun doesn’t plan to slow down.

It should be noted that Aliyun recently launched its first US datacenter several months ago.

Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said that the investment only represents the initial stage of the company’s plan.

The funding will be used to expand Aliyun’s global 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.

“Our hope is for Aliyun to continually empower customers and partners with new capabilities and help companies upgrade their basic infrastructure”.

“We see that Amazon took 10 years to get to where it is today”, Aliyun president Simon Hu last week.

Alibaba will likely look at its existing customer base and try to branch out from there in order to achieve its goal of “Overtaking Amazon” as stated by their executive staff.

The news comes as Amazon Web Services announces that Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine, is now available to all of its customers. Aliyun will also assist Yonyou on its journey to the cloud and big data.

Aliyun has data centres in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Silicon Valley, with a data centre in Dubai now under construction. The company says that as of the end of June 2014, 1.4 million customers were using Aliyun services directly or through independent software vendors. But in markets like the U.S.it faces established rivals with deep pockets.