Alibaba Launching Second Silicon Valley Data Center

AliCloud, cloud services arm of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is launching its second Silicon Valley data center, the company announced Friday, inviting potential customers to sign up for services in the new facility starting October 12.

Alibaba’s push into the US cloud services market, putting the company in direct competition with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in their biggest market, started earlier this year with the announcement of the first Alibaba data center in Silicon Valley. The company has not elaborated whether it has been leasing space from data center providers in California or building its own facilities.

AliCloud also struck a number of partnerships with companies to integrate new products and services into its cloud platform. The new partners are Mesosphere, Bankware Global, Appcara, Appnovation, Cloud Comrade, and Panzura.

According to its statement issued Friday, the second Silicon Valley site will be its fourth in the US. Alibaba has not said where in the US the other two cloud data centers are.

One of the most recent AliCloud data centers that came online is in Zhejiang Province, China. Using a number of cutting-edge technologies, the facility is a showcase for modern cloud data center design.

The company now has nine cloud data center sites around the world, which is fewer than Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure have but more than Google. The Alphabet subsidiary has a massive global data center fleet to deliver its online services, but far from all of them host its cloud infrastructure services.

The amount of cloud locations is an important attribute of a cloud provider. The more distributed their infrastructure is, the more attractive it is for customers that deliver services globally. Distributed infrastructure also provides customers with more options for failover locations.

After the recent launch if a cloud region at its South Carolina data center, Google provides cloud services out of four locations. AWS has four general-public regions and one government cloud region in the Americas, plus two in Europe and four in Asia Pacific.

Microsoft Azure cloud lives in seven locations in the Americas, two in Europe, and nine in Asia Pacific, including the three recently launched India regions.