Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba, announced today that it has opened its first data center in Indonesia. The data center is the largest and also the first international public cloud service in the country. The company said its data center will help address the rising demand coming from the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups in Indonesia.
The data center will provide a range of cloud products and services including database management, security, and big data to meet the needs of local industries.
The company also launched its big data processing platform “MaxCompute” in Indonesia. The platform is capable of processing and storing massive amounts of data. It will provide services such as data processing, big data analytics and machine learning to local businesses. Alibaba Cloud said they hope to push forward data-driven innovation and digital transformation in Indonesia.
“As the only global cloud-services provider originating from Asia, we are uniquely positioned with cultural and contextual advantages to provide innovative data-intelligence solutions and computing capabilities to customers across this region,” said Alex Li, the general manager of Asia Pacific at Alibaba Cloud.
The newly opened data center will bring Alibaba one step closer to fulling its commitment to support the Indonesian government’s effort to create 1,000 startups by 2020.
With the launch of the data center, Alibaba Cloud now has 18 locations worldwide including Singapore, Japan, Australia, and Germany.
Alibaba has been eyeing new opportunities brought by the region’s increasing demand for digital services, and it is not alone. Chinese tech companies’ presence has soared in Southeast Asia over the past few years. A number of new data centers have been launched by big-name Chinese tech companies, including Huawei, Tencent, and Baidu.