Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced plans to build its first data center in the Philippines by the end of 2021, forming part of the $1-billion expansion of the tech giant to Southeast Asia in the next three years.
“We want to help the Philippines and the Asia Pacific to accelerate their digitalization. So we will put more resources here, not only to build the local data centers, but also we’ll try to put more infrastructures, or technologies, products, and talents in Asia Pacific, especially in Philippines,” said Alibaba cloud intelligence general manager for Hong Kong, Macau and the Philippines Lee Liu.
The new data center will extend the reach of Alibaba Cloud’s offerings in the Philippines, ranging from elastic compute, database, security and network services to machine learning and data analytics capabilities.
Local businesses across sectors such as financial technology (FinTech), e-commerce, education and media will be able to adopt and implement cloud technologies more efficiently and better position themselves to capture the emerging opportunities in the country, Liu said.