With cloud services becoming increasingly important amid the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced it will spend 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) on its cloud infrastructure over the next three years in an effort to help businesses embrace digitization.
The investment will focus on technologies related to semiconductors, operating systems, networks and severs, Alibaba Cloud said in a statement emailed to Caixin.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has posed additional stress on the overall economy across sectors, but it also steers us to put more focus on the digital economy,” Alibaba Cloud Intelligence president Jeff Zhang said in the statement.
The coronavirus pandemic has increased the demand for Alibaba’s cloud services such as its enterprise collaboration app DingTalk, which also doubles as an online learning platform.
In the final quarter of 2019, Alibaba Cloud controlled nearly half of China’s cloud infrastructure service market, surpassing rivals Tencent and Baidu by a substantial margin, statistics by research firm Canalys showed.
Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com)
Related: Alibaba Now Controls Nearly Half of China’s Cloud Service Market, Research Says
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