Alibaba Cloud to invest $28 billion as companies focus on digital economy amid coronavirus
The Chinese company said it is committed to offering enhanced cloud services to its clients across the globe, aiming to help businesses speed up their digital transformation.
The dependency on digital tools amid the coronavirus pandemic has led the Alibaba Group to increase its focus on enhancing its cloud infrastructure. On Monday, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of the group said that it will invest an additional $28 billion (RMB200 billion) in the next three years on its cloud infrastructure, focusing on technologies such as operating system, servers, chips and network.
Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence said, “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.
“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.”
Earler this year, At YourStory's Future of Work conference, Yaw Yeo, General Manager of International Product and Business for several product groups (CDN, Edge Computing, Video, cPaaS) under Alibaba Cloud spoke about how the coronavirus was literally redefining the future of how Alibaba Cloud works.
“The coronavirus is something that has been weighing on all our minds. We have been applying a lot of our technologies to help minimise the impact of the situation on work and people. In various cities across China, tens of millions of people have to stay at their homes. This has had a tremendous impact on business,” Yaw said.
Yaw also gave the example of how Alibaba’s e-commerce sellers took to live-streaming after they were no longer able to go out and promote their products.
“It’s not just the small-time sellers, even larger brands have turned to live-streaming to sell their products,” he said.
Alibaba’s DingTalk had launched a 'remote office' function for free for 10 million companies and organisations, which was supported by Alibaba Cloud, to assist organisations to resume businesses via the cloud.
The Chinese company also announced that its cloud revenue had grown 62 percent to $1.5 billion in 2020.
Over the past decade, the global cloud computing major has developed its proprietary technologies such as 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.
Alibaba Cloud has data centres in 63 availability zones, two of which are in India, across 21 regions serving millions of customers across the globe. It has more than 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide.
(Edited by Ramarko Sengupta)