China’s Alibaba expands operations in India with foray into cloud computing services

Alibaba Cloud aims to work closely with more Indian enterprises as it opens the doors of its new data centre in Mumbai next month.

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Simon Hu Xiaoming, the president of Alibaba Cloud, announced in Beijing late on Wednesday the launch of the company's first data centre in India, the third-largest information technology market in Asia. The new facility in Mumbai will open in January next year. Photo: Handout

Published: 11:40pm, 21 Dec 2017Updated: 11:40pm, 21 Dec 2017

Alibaba Group Holding is set to expand its operations in India from e-commerce to cloud computing services with the launch next month of a new data centre in the country, Asia’s third-largest information technology market after Japan and China.

The Hangzhou-based company said on Thursday that its cloud computing subsidiary, Alibaba Cloud, has partnered with telecommunications services provider Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) to open that facility in Mumbai, the financial centre and most populous city in India.

It marks an escalation of Alibaba Cloud’s international development initiatives as it seeks to unseat Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of US e-commerce firm Amazon, as the world’s top provider of cloud services.

Simon Hu Xiaoming, the president of Alibaba Cloud, said in a statement that the new data centre, which will raise the total number of its facilities to 16 worldwide, will “enable us to work closely with more Indian enterprises” in the world’s sixth largest economy.

“These local enterprises are innovative and operating in growth sectors, and we look forward to empowering them through our cloud computing and data technologies,” said Hu.

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 managed inside data centres. “Cloud” refers to the internet.