China’s Alibaba targets data centres in bid to replace Amazon as cloud computing king by 2018

Chinese e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group is ramping up its investment in data centres overseas in a bid to challenge US rival Amazon in cloud computing, an area that currently only makes up a tiny fraction of the group's overall revenue.  

Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, will establish data centres in Asian countries such as India and Japan, parts of the Middle East and Europe over the next 18 months, Aliyun president Simon Hu said on Wednesday. He did not disclose figures.

“The cloud business will be a very important sector for Alibaba,” Hu said in Beijing. “We hope to match or even surpass Amazon in three to four years.”

Amazon’s cloud business, referred to as Amazon Web Services, drew US$1.57 billion in the first quarter of 2015. This puts it on track to keep pace with analysts’ estimates of US$6 billion annual revenue. 

Companies like Amazon and Aliyun help businesses process and store data on remote servers.

Boosting its cloud computing business is one of Alibaba’s key growth strategies over the next decade. The company has already attracted Rovio Entertainment, creator of the hit mobile game Angry Birds, to utilise its cloud computing services.