Alibaba Targets Amazon with New Data Centers Across Asia

By Luke Bellos, Editor, TMCnet  |  October 21, 2021

Asia’s largest online ecommerce platform Alibaba revealed this week it intends to open two new cloud data centers in South Korea and Thailand, adding fuel to an ongoing competition with American e-commerce giant, Amazon.

Alibaba and Amazon have seen explosive growth over the last decade, and have expanded their respective brands by diversifying into a number of different areas outside of general retail. One of the most notable business ventures for both companies have been cloud services and data storage, which has become a highly competitive arena over the last year as a result of evolving work culture. This has intensified the rivalry between both companies as both attempt to expand operations into new territories across the globe.

Representatives with Alibaba’s cloud division revealed plans to develop new data centers at the 2021 Apsara Cloud Computing conference, one of the most notable cloud/AI conferences across Asia. Along with these plans, Alibaba also officially launched a new chip, the Yitian 710, which will help power AI-based applications on Alibaba’s cloud servers.

It seems clear that Alibaba understands the future potential of cloud services, and knows that gaining early control of the sector could lead to serious revenue in the long term. Cloud services currently make up 8% of Alibaba’s total revenue, and will likely increase as more businesses and enterprises migrate away from legacy systems. However, tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft (News - Alert) are not far behind in market domination, which means Alibaba will have to work diligently to spread its presence into undeveloped territories.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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