(Yicai Global) April 20 -- Alibaba Cloud Computing, China’s largest cloud services provider, plans to spend an additional CNY200 billion (USD28.3 billion) on researching core technologies and building new data centers over the next three years.

The investment will go into cloud operating systems, servers, chips and networks, The Paper cited President Jeff Zhang as saying.

“Cloud-computing intelligence is one of the core strategies of Alibaba Group,” Zhang said. “The firm will invest more in the sector instead of reducing the corresponding investment amid the Covid-19 pandemic.”

AliCloud was the world’s third-largest firm in its sector by revenue last year. Its USD5 billion bested global rivals Google and IBM, but lagged behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. AliCloud is king in the Asian market, with a 19.6 percent share, equal to the sum of that held by AWS and Azure, figures from Gartner show.

The new investment could triple the size of the Hangzhou-based company’s data center and server capacity, giving it one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world, the report cited an industry source as saying.

In China, AliCloud counts half of the country’s listed companies and 80 percent of tech firms among its clients. It had a domestic market share of 46.4 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, well above rival Tencent, whose 18 percent share placed it second, according to data from Canalys.

Editor: James Boynton