Aliyun's second data center in Silicon Valley, California. (Photo : Aliyun.com)
China's largest cloud service provider Aliyun is set to build its second data center in Silicon Valley in the U.S., as part of the company's plans to expand into the global cloud service market, the company announced on Friday.
The announcement comes about eight months after Aliyun, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Holding, launched its first data center in Silicon Valley.
Once completed, the data center will be the company's ninth data center across the globe, with several more planned for construction in Japan, Europe and the Middle East, Aliyun's senior product director Li Jin said in a press conference in July.
According to Aliyun, the second data center in the U.S. is expected to meet the needs of the cloud computing market west of America in the next three to five years.
In March, the company established its first data center in Silicon Valley, catering to North America's booming cloud computing market, which was then followed by another data center in Singapore in August, which targeted the Asia-Pacific region.
"We launched three overseas data centers this year. As a result, our overseas business has more than quadrupled since then," said Aliyun's vice president, Yu Sicheng.
According to the International Data Corp. (IDC), Aliyun is China's largest provider of public cloud services in the past year, accounting for 29.7 percent of the market, surpassing the market shares of Amazon, Microsoft and IBM in China in 2014.
The global cloud service market has been growing rapidly in recent years, with the lion's share of revenues coming from customers in the U.S.
According to Intel, around half of applications deployed today run on cloud infrastructure. By 2020, the global chipmaker expects 85 percent of applications to run in the cloud, including those in public and private networks.
As the cloud market grows, it also drives a lot of business for data center service providers.
