Alibaba’s cloud push comes to Singapore

SINGAPORE — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is making Singapore the headquarters for the overseas business of its cloud-computing arm, as well as opening a new cloud data centre here in September, underscoring its desire to bolster its international expansion.

“Singapore is a natural destination to be our headquarters for overseas expansion,” Mr Ethan Yu, vice-president of Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing business, said in a press statement.

“We are seeing healthy demand for cloud-related data management services in Singapore, because of the ease of doing business, comprehensive transport and telecommunications connections and robust intellectual property regime. The stable geo-political climate and abundance of highly skilled talent are advantages too.”

Scheduled for an early September launch, the Singapore facility will be its seventh globally, and provide a range of cloud-computing services to companies operating in South-east Asia, with an initial focus on Chinese businesses, Aliyun said. When it opens next month, the centre will be connected with the existing six centres in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Silicon Valley, it added.

Alibaba Group announced last month it would invest US$1 billion (S$1.4 billion) into Aliyun to challenge Amazon.com’s lucrative Web Services division, opening a global front in the battle between the two e-commerce giants.

“Our goal is to overtake Amazon in four years, whether that’s in customers, technology, or worldwide scale,” Mr Simon Hu, the president of Aliyun, told Reuters last month.

“Amazon, Microsoft and others have already laid the groundwork for us by educating the markets about cloud in the US and Europe, so we have an even better opportunity to join in the competition.”

In a separate interview with CNBC yesterday, Mr Yu described the new facility in Singapore as a “strategic” centre that could give the cloud division an edge over its competition.

“I think we are still on a learning curve in terms of (understanding) customer needs in different markets. Singapore’s (data centre) is the most strategic and, hopefully, will become the biggest we have outside China. This will definitely play a role (in helping) Aliyun to catch up with the top players,” he said. He also revealed that Aliyun was building a new portal to serve the different language and payment needs of businesses based in an economically and culturally-diverse region such as South-east Asia. Agencies