A new Silicon Valley data center owned by Alibaba is set to open later this year. However, the company is not going to use this center to support its e-commerce websites, as instead it will be providing cloud services for businesses.
Alibaba is China's biggest Internet company with the largest IPO in history. It has three major websites, Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com, and is the world's fastest growing e-commerce market. The cloud services portion of the company, Aliyun, is fairly new compared to these three major megastores.
This new center is designed to meet the needs of Chinese enterprises in the United States to bring cost-efficient, cutting-edge computing services to clients outside of China. However, Ethan Sicheng Yu, a vice president of the organization, added that the company would seek to obtain Western companies as clients in the second half of 2015.
Whether or not Alibaba sets out to invest in further data centers in the U.S. remains to be seen. This move gives the organization a foothold in a major U.S. technology center for the first time, and may be the beginning of closer Internet ties between the U.S. and China.
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