Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group's digital technology subsidiary, announced today at the Apsara Conference 2021 its plans to open two new data centers in South Korea and Thailand.
The e-commerce company, China's leading cloud computing provider, has been concentrating on growing its reach overseas. Alibaba recently focused its expansion in Asia, establishing operations in countries such as Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia, where it is competing for business with rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Alibaba said that businesses of all sizes in South Korea will be able to deploy mission-critical workloads while also benefiting from more dependable and secure cloud services with lower latency. The company said its new data center in Thailand will provide services that are in accordance with Thailand 4.0, the Thai government's 20-year goal to foster digital innovation.
"As one of the world's top three cloud service providers, we are committed to bringing our world-class, hyper-scale cloud infrastructure to South Korea and Thailand," Alibaba said.
In addition to its infrastructure investment, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled new technologies, products, and solutions. The company said the new cloud products will make cloud services more accessible to companies and developers by increasing security, availability, and flexibility in both cloud-native and on-premise settings.
With the fourth generation of its flagship product, Alibaba Cloud's ApsaraCompute, the company introduced new features that support the increasing demands of cloud computing. These include container elasticity, storage, and improved input/output performance.
Alibaba Cloud also unveiled upgrades to its PolarDB to feature three-level separation, which marks the end of the line for the CPU and memory cores. This allows for greater flexibility and better availability, the company claimed.
The company also launched its new Alibaba AI, a digital intelligence platform that simplifies the management of intelligent assets securely and efficiently. With this platform, the company said businesses can now benefit from an AI-powered platform that can give them access to advanced digital tools.
Another product Alibaba unveiled at the Apsara Conference was its new Yitian 710 processor, which it plans to use in its new Panjiu servers. Alibaba said the new chip will help power artificial intelligence applications on its various cloud products.
Cloud computing is expected to be a key profit driver for Alibaba in the long run, despite accounting for only about 8% of the company's total revenue right now. Alibaba still greatly depends on its primary e-commerce business to generate profits.
