Advertisement
US-listed Chinese stocks
TechBig Tech

JD.com, US firm Cloudflare join forces to challenge Alibaba in China’s vast cloud market

  • With JD Cloud & AI as partner, Cloudflare plans to establish 150 new data centres in mainland China
  • Alibaba continues to lead China’s cloud services market, with a 46.1 per cent share in 2019

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
The JD Cloud & AI and Cloudflare partnership aims to help enterprises increase the performance and security of their websites and online services in mainland China. Illustration: Shutterstock
Minghe Hu

Long-standing competition between e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com is set to intensify across the broader enterprise sector, as both companies ratchet up initiatives in China’s fast-growing cloud computing services market.

JD.com fired a major salvo at its main Chinese online retail rival this week, with the announcement of a partnership between US content-delivery-network services provider Cloudflare and its JD Cloud & AI business unit.

Through its partnership with JD Cloud & AI, Cloudflare will establish 150 new data centres in mainland China, up from 17 such facilities at present, to help global enterprises do business in China and domestic companies expand overseas, according to a joint statement from the two firms on Tuesday. Investment details were not provided.

San Francisco-based Cloudflare, which started doing business on the mainland in 2015, is focused on increasing the performance and security of its enterprise customers’ websites and online services.

“With the global pandemic increasing the strain on internet traffic, cloud services providers are increasing their capacity to support the demand,” said Wong Yih-khai, a senior analyst at technology research firm Canalys. “This is crucial for JD Cloud & AI given that its customers are typically retail and commerce-based.”

The latest partnership of Nasdaq-listed JD.com, which has applied to raise capital in Hong Kong in a secondary listing, reflects the high stakes in China’s cloud infrastructure services market, which is the world’s second largest behind the United States.

Advertisement