Alibaba hopes to spread its digital cloud worldwide through Equinix partnership

E-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group is pushing aggressively to expand its cloud-computing business worldwide through a strategic alliance with Equinix, the world's largest data-centre services provider.

Equinix said on Friday it has signed an agreement to work with Alibaba subsidiary Aliyun, mainland China's biggest cloud services operator, to provide secure and direct access to its cloud platform for companies in both Hong Kong and California's Silicon Valley.

"This is just the first step. We expect this partnership to help Aliyun further expand its reach into other markets around the world," Alex Tam Wing-yiu, the managing director for Hong Kong of United States-based Equinix, told the South China Morning Post.

Cloud services enable companies to buy, lease, sell or distribute software and other digital resources online, similar to how electricity is taken from a power grid and shared.

Such services and applications are hosted and managed by data centres - secure, temperature-controlled facilities that equipped to house large-capacity servers and companies’ data-storage systems. They are supported by multiple power sources and high-bandwidth links to the internet.

The collaboration between Equinix and Aliyun followed the latter’s launch in March of its first overseas-based data centre in Silicon Valley, which is home to many of the world's largest technology companies and thousands of innovative tech start-ups.