Alibaba bets big on cloud expansion to drive global growth
Subsidiary Alibaba Cloud processed a record 175,000 orders per second at the peak of Singles’ Day online shopping event
With a mission to serve two billion consumers in the next 20 years, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has set the course for the rapid global expansion of its cloud computing business on the back of the record number of transactions that it processed during Singles’ Day this year.
Alibaba Cloud, known on the mainland as Aliyun, processed a record 175,000 orders per second, without incident, at the peak of the group’s 24-hour 11.11 online shopping festival last Friday, and cross-border transactions were completed for 235 countries and territories.
“Alibaba Group has advanced from being an e-commerce company to a global technology leader, enabling us to power the future of retail through ... big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality,” Alibaba chief technology officer Jeff Zhang Jianfeng said on Sunday.
An Alibaba Cloud spokesman said the company was on track to open new infrastructure in Dubai, Japan and Australia, as well as in Europe, by the end of this year.
Cloud computing enables companies to buy, sell, lease or distribute online a range of software and other digital resources as an on-demand service, just like electricity from a power grid.
These resources are kept and managed inside data centres. “Cloud” refers to the internet as depicted in computer network diagrams.