Alibaba Cloud is expected to invest $ 1 billion over the next three years to support its partners’ “technological innovation and market expansion”.
The Chinese tech giant’s cloud computing investment will consist of a combination of financial and non-financial incentives, including “financing, rebates and go-to-market initiatives.”
In addition, Alibaba Cloud is also expected to launch a “regional accelerator” program to provide its partners in different markets with a localized model of business collaboration.
So what’s the bigger picture?
Alibaba already controls a fairly large part of the cloud storage market, according to Gartner statistics (opens in a new tab)only outstripped Microsoft and Amazon with 9.5% market share in 2021.
The branch already has approximately 11,000 partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortinet, IBM and Neo4j.
Alibaba Cloud has already been active when it comes to expanding internationally.
As part of the Global Delivery and Service Program, in 2022, it launched three Customer Service Centers located in Malaysia, Portugal and Mexico to support international customers in the implementation of the cloud.
But unfortunately for investors, Alibaba’s expansion beyond its core market is subject to regulatory scrutiny.
In 2022, the U.S. government was reported to review Alibaba Cloud to determine if it posed a national security risk.
According to the report by Reuters (opens in a new tab)The Biden administration’s investigation aimed to determine how the company handled US customer data and whether the Chinese government could gain access to US intellectual property.
The company based in Hangzhou, China, however, aims to take over not only the cloud computing market.
Alibaba has formed a subsidiary called Lingyang Intelligent Service Company, which it says will offer “digital intelligence services to enterprises.”
The new business unit could potentially compete with companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP in the business intelligence space.