Alibaba Cloud – the cloud division of Chinese giant Alibaba – today announced that it will launch a new data center in India’s financial capital city Mumbai. The center, which will become operational from next month, will help Alibaba in efficiently meeting the increasing demands for its cloud computing services among small and medium Indian companies. However, Chinese conglomerate did not disclose any investment details with regard to its first even data center in India.
“India is a key market in Alibaba Cloud’s globalization strategy, and the firm sees tremendous business opportunity given the rapid growth of the Indian economy and the nature of the enterprises looking to expand from the country,” the official statement released by Alibaba said.
Apart from giving access to several standard services, Alibaba cloud’s soon to be launched data center will allow Indian customers to enjoy some new services like elastic computing, content delivery, containers and middleware. This center will be operated by locally hired team and professional constants.
Alibaba Cloud had first revealed the plan to launch a new data center in India and also Indonesia In June. The company has created similar centers across different parts of the world as it makes a continuous push to compete against global players like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Currently, Alibaba’s subsidiary company earns most of its revenue from the native market of Mainland China. On other hand, revenue from international markets continues to grow at a steady pace.
According to last quarter’s figures, Alibaba Cloud net sales reached RMB 3 billion ($447 million) while making a $ 105 million loss. The company blamed heavy investment in R&D for the losses. However, it did reach the milestone of 1 million customers for the very first time.