SB Cloud will open a new data center in Japan and allow Alibaba to sell its cloud services to customers ranging from start-ups to multinational companies. The SoftBank tie up may be the newest action for rsquo & AliCloud;s worldwide expansion, which began this past year, using the organization saying a $1-billion expenditure reserved for worldwide expansion.
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ALIBABA yesterday announced a joint venture with Japanese telecom operator SoftBank to provide cloud-computing services in Japan.
In return, Alibaba will gain access to SoftBank’s existing Japanese business customer base.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
SB Cloud will enable Alibaba Cloud to further expand its cloud-computing service platform by leveraging SoftBank’s extensive business customer base in Japan, where the demand for public cloud-computing services is growing rapidly, the companies said.
Alibaba’s cloud business drew in 1 billion Yuan or $153 million in revenue in just the March quarter of 2016.
According to SB Cloud CEO Eric Gan, who also serves as executive vice president of SoftBank – a major shareholder of Alibaba – the companies had been working on the joint venture for several months prior to the announcement on Friday.
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