Alibaba opens 2nd data centre in United States of America, looks towards Europe

AliCloud is seen as a growing threat to Amazon Web Services, which just announced a slew of new products at its re:Invent event in Las Vegas.

Alibaba’s chief executive Daniel Zhang underlined globalization as the company’s number one priority earlier this year.

Alibaba Group has launched its second data center in Silicon Valley in the United States. The company has also said it will pour $1bn (£653m) into its cloud computing push. It launched its first data center in Silicon Valley in March, confirming its ambitions to enter the USA market.

The new USA data center is created to accommodate the cloud and big data needs of customers in the West Coast for the next three to five years.

Alibaba believes internet-based computing and big data will boost growth in the next decade, tapping into demand for processing and storage from governments, finance and online gaming companies. (NASDAQ:AMZN), the said facility is its ninth data center globally and fourth announced in 2015. AliCloud, which maintains data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai in China, also plans more facilities in other locations in the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

“Our second US data center is situated in Silicon Valley which is the epicenter for technology innovation worldwide”. AliCloud could account for more than $1 billion of Alibaba’s revenue by 2018 and public cloud presents a $120 billion global market opportunity, according to research by SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. “We expect to welcome more partners and customers onto the AliCloud platform as we extend our global reach and continue to deliver outstanding value for our cloud computing infrastructure services”.