Aliyun to invest 200b yuan over next 3 years
Alibaba's cloud division Aliyun said on Monday that it plans to invest 200 billion yuan (US$28.2 billion) in the next three years to fuel the construction of data centers, operation systems, servers and other digital research initiatives.
Alibaba opened its Shanghai R&D Center in last December at the Zhangjiang Artificial Intelligence Island to seeks deeper collaboration with the city's cloud computing and integrated circuit industry.
The investment pledge is expected to further expand the scale of Aliyun’s data centers and servers.
Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Alibaba Group’s chief technology officer, said it will not scale back during the coronavirus crisis and will continue to step up digital infrastructure investment.
The move is also in response to the city's call to further enhance the digital economy which was laid out in a three-year action plan last week.
Alibaba Cloud said it aims to launch innovation digital practices based on technology advancements in areas such as voice recognition and online education solutions.
"We plan to increase research efforts in 5G, chips and artificial intelligence and to expand more opportunities to apply these latest research projects to better merge with various industry sectors," said Xu Min, head of Alibaba’s digital government business unit in Shanghai.
Its future investment will focus on regions with relatively advanced levels of development for digital economy such as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area.
