Report: Second Alibaba Cloud Data Center Coming to US

Ramping up its push into the US cloud services market, Chinese internet giant Alibaba’s cloud arm Aliyun is planning a second cloud data center on US soil. The announcement comes about four months after the company announced the launch of its first US data center in Silicon Valley.

The global cloud service market is enormous and growing, and the biggest share of the revenue comes from customers in the US. One recent analyst estimate pegged total annual cloud-services revenue at more than $16 billion on a worldwide basis.

Intel estimates that about half of applications deployed today run on some kind of cloud infrastructure. By 2020, the company expects 85 percent of applications to run in the cloud, which includes both public and private clouds.

As the cloud market grows, it also drives a lot of business for data center service providers. Aliyun’s Silicon Valley expansion was in a service-provider data center, although the company did not disclose who that service provider was.

In interviews, data center providers consistently name cloud as one of the biggest demand drivers for their services. Stuart Thompson, director or real estate for the Americas region at Equinix, for example, said the world’s largest data center service provider has had “a lot of success building out space for cloud providers.”

Aliyun, China’s largest cloud service provider, plans to launch its second US cloud data center in several months, as part of a global expansion plan, Li Jin, senior product director at Aliyun, said in a press conference in Beijing this week, according to a China Daily report. Hi did not disclose any more details about the plan, saying only that it also included opening cloud data centers in Singapore, Japan, and Europe.

Another part of the plan is building out a global content delivery network. Aliyun already operates the largest CDN in China.

Also on Wednesday, Aliyun announced a Data Protection Pact, which is a formal commitment to protecting customers’ data privacy.