Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, said it has supported 38 percent of the Fortune 500 companies over the past fiscal year.
With this milestone, the cloud service provider plans to accelerate its globalization strategy, aiming to become the world’s leading digital intelligence backbone in three years.
Apart from expanding service coverage and building even more next-generation data centers around the world, Alibaba Cloud has also committed to hiring a further 5,000 staff globally in areas from network, database, servers and chips to artificial intelligence, the Associated Press reported.
“We are extremely confident in the future of the global digital economy, especially with the digitalization of healthcare, business, education, leisure and other parts of our lives during the pandemic,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, at the Alibaba Cloud Summit 2020 event.
"As the largest cloud service provider in the Asia Pacific region, we will continue increasing investments in the next three years to strengthen our infrastructure, our solutions and our role in the wider technology ecosystem towards being the trusted partner of choice not just in Asia Pacific, but for the global digital economy by 2023," he added.
Consistently ranked as the biggest public cloud-service provider in the Asia Pacific region and third in the world by all relevant third-party measures in the past several years, Alibaba Cloud’s goal is supported by an unprecedented RMB200 billion ($28 billion) investment plan first announced in April to expand and enhance its infrastructure and product portfolio.
To date, Alibaba Cloud operates 63 availability zones in 21 regions around the world, supporting the needs of businesses in over 200 countries and territories. As the first step of the recent investment plan, Alibaba Cloud will open its third data center and the first data-scrubbing center in Indonesia next year.