Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, is set to open its second data centre in Dubai next year, a top company official said.
The company opened its first new data centre in the Middle East in Dubai last year, operated by YVOLV, a 50-50 joint venture between Alibaba Cloud and Dubai-based Meraas Holding.
Simon Hu, Senior Vice-President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud, said that the region has the capacity for more data centres as digital transformation is growing at an enormous pace.
“We have reached a number of milestones here. We have partnered with Khalifa University of Science and Technology to identify joint opportunities in big data, internet of things, robotics and cloud computing,” said Simon Hu, Senior Vice-President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud.
By combining the research capability of the institute, he said a major technological breakthrough was made that can help Abu Dhabi in its enhanced oil recovery efforts.
Alibaba made its foray into the cloud services business in 2009, opening cloud storage, computing and data analysis technologies to third-party customers.
The biggest competition is among the three “A”s — Amazon Web Services, Azure (Microsoft) and Alibaba Cloud.
Alibaba Cloud is ranked third behind Amazon and Microsoft in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud services market, according to research firm Gartner.
