Alibaba to Launch Singapore Cloud Data Center Next Month

Aliyun, the cloud services arm of Chinese web giant Alibaba, has officially announced plans to launch a cloud data center in Singapore in September.

The tiny island nation has become one of the major business and technology gateways between key Asia Pacific markets and the rest of the world. As such, its data center industry is booming. A recent analyst estimate pegged the size of Singapore’s data center colocation market at $1 billion.

Aliyun has a partnership with Singtel, a Singapore telco that’s also the biggest data center provider on the island.

In addition to being the location of Aliyun’s seventh cloud data center, Singapore will serve as headquarters for the company’s rapidly expanding international operations.

Alibaba recently announced a $1 billion investment program for its cloud services business, including cloud data centers in Silicon Valley, a second one in a yet undisclosed US location, and additional facilities in Europe, Middle East, and Asia. Its Asian data center plans include Singapore and Japan.

“Singapore is a natural destination to be our headquarters for overseas expansion,” Aliyun VP Sicheng Yu said in a statement. “The city state is a natural springboard into the Asia Pacific region, not only for us, but for our target audience.”

Aliyun data centers already online are in China, Hong Kong, and Silicon Valley.

The cloud data center in Singapore will support the gamut of Aliyun’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, including cloud compute, relational database, load balancing, caching, storage, NoSQL database, and security.

Aliyun claims to have grown revenue from its cloud computing and internet infrastructure business more than 100 percent year over year in a recently completed quarter.