Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group will extend its cloud-computing services to overseas markets in March, the China Daily reports. Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud-computing division, is scheduled to set up data centres outside China to provide cloud-computing services to local enterprises and Chinese companies' overseas operations, the company announced. By building platforms for companies to manage and store data in the cloud, Aliyun will become the first Chinese company to reach out to the foreign public cloud segment, days after its US counterpart Amazon announced the launch of similar services in China. The company did not disclose the first destination for Aliyun's global outreach, but the US and southeast Asia are likely targets. As the country's largest cloud-computing platform, Aliyun provides services for hundreds of thousands of Chinese websites and e-commerce vendors, banks, game developers and others. Aliyun may team up with local telecom carriers to avoid local regulatory restrictions, it noted.
