Alibaba Opens Data Centre In Silicon Valley

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has opened its first ever cloud computing data centre in the US this year.

Located in Silicon Valley, the data centre will be run by Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing division.

Back in China, Alibaba has more than 1.4 million customers for its cloud services over five data centres (four in mainland China and one in Hong Kong), and is the largest IaaS provider in China with a 22.8% market share in the first half of 2014, according to IDC.

Overseas companies

The data centre will at first offer up cloud services that will hopefully attract overseas Chinese business. Alibaba said that US businesses will also be sought after as it “learns more about the needs of overseas companies”.

Sicheng Yu, Aliyun’s VP, said in a press release: “Aliyun offers users top-notch cloud computing products and services at competitive prices. Now Aliyun hopes to meet the needs of Chinese enterprises in the United States, and the ultimate objective of Aliyun is to bring cost-efficient and cutting-edge cloud computing services to benefit more clients outside China to boost their business development.”

Aliyun is set to offer competing services to the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, such as storage, processing, and the running of websites. Aliyun also provides data security. An Aliyun cloud security service called YunDun claims to have last year successfully fended off a hacker attack on a Chinese gaming app company that is believed to be the largest DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack ever recorded on the mainland.

The location for the data centre has not been revealed, and no pricing information for the cloud services is yet known.

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