Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will invest 200 billion yuan (just over 26 billion euros) over the next three years through its subsidiary Alibaba Cloud with the aim of boosting the infrastructure of its cloud businesses and services, competing with the American multinationals Amazon and Microsoft, due to the increase in demand following the Covid-19 pandemic, as announced by the company.
“Alibaba Cloud will invest another 200 billion yuan over the next three years in developing key technologies such as cloud operating systems, servers, microprocessors and creating data centers,” the Chinese company reported.
Spending in the Chinese cloud infrastructure market registered a growth of 63.7% in 2019, exceeding 10.7 billion dollars (9.858 million euros), according to the analysis firm Canalys, which attributes to Alibaba Cloud a 46.1% of the business, ahead of Tencent Cloud, with 17.3%; followed by AWS and Baidu AI Cloud.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has created additional stress across all sectors of the economy, but it also leads us to focus more on the digital economy,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, in a statement collected by ‘South China Morning Post ‘, newspaper belonging to the Alibaba group.
In this sense, the President of Alibaba Cloud stated that by increasing the company’s investment in cloud infrastructures and fundamental technologies, he hopes to help companies during the recovery process from the crisis caused by the pandemic.
