Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has stepped up its efforts to increase its presence and get more potential clients in the booming global cloud computing market as Aliyun, its cloud computing agency, recently opened a data center in the United States.
Alibaba's first data center overseas opened in March at Silicon Valley, home of the world's largest tech firms and thousands of startup companies.
An article by technologynewschina.com said that the new data center would initially offer cloud computing services to Chinese companies in the U.S before they take on international clients.
Yu Sicheng, Aliyun's vice president and head of its international business, explains how the data center works.
"We have a professional team called 'IDST' in the United States. It researches our capacity to process big data so as to help us apply cutting-edge technology to our big data platforms. The team has recruited both Chinese American and local American big-data talents in order to build the world's largest data exchange platform," Yu was quoted as saying.
Yu added that the expansion into the U.S. is only an initial step in their international strategy as the company is planning to set up more overseas data centers in other countries in Europe, the Middle East and Japan.
The report said that the company's effort to take advantage of the global cloud computing market has earned it nearly $150 billion as of the end of 2014.
In March, the company also showed its new data venture and its enhanced capacity in cloud computing when Alibaba unveiled its facial recognition payment technology called "Smile to Pay," enabling users to make payments by mobile phones using selfies.
"Online payment to buy things is always a big headache. You forget your password. You worry about the security. Today we show you a new technology in the future how people buy things online, " Chairman Jack Ma said during his keynote speech at the CeBit trade fair in March.
Alibaba's online retail platform Taobao, supported by Aliyun cloud services, also made it possible to create 80,000 orders per second at last year's annual local online shopping spree dubbed "Double 11."
The report said that Alipay managed to handle 2.85 million payments every minute using the cloud service.