By Arjun Kharpal (CNBC) Yahoo Finance
Alibaba (BABA) is planning to launch four new data centers across the world, the Chinese e-commerce giant said on Monday, as it steps up its competition against Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) in the rapidly-growing cloud computing market.
The data centers will be located in Dubai, Tokyo in Japan, Germany and Sydney, Australia. It takes the number of Alibaba Cloud data centers outside of China to eight, with the Chinese technology giant now on nearly every major continent.
“With the addition of those four data centers, it will cover our customers globally,” Ethan Yu, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global, told CNBC in a phone interview.
In each market, Alibaba Cloud has formed joint ventures (JV) and partnerships. In Dubai, Alibaba has formed a JV with Meraas Holdings called YVOLV. In Germany, Alibaba has partnered with Vodafone to open its first data center in Europe. Alibaba will use Vodafone’s data center in order to sell its cloud services. In Japan, a JV with Softbank called SB Cloud Corporation was formed earlier this year.