Chinese tech giant Alibaba plans to open its third cloud data centre in Indonesia in 2021 with a hope to expand its presence in this market amidst rising competition.

An Alibaba Cloud data centre (Photo: Alibaba)

Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba, recently said that the centre will minimise data loss-related risks by dividing workloads between the company’s three centres in Indonesia. The two previous centres were built in 2018 and 2019.

Alibaba Cloud Country Manager Leon Chen stressed that opening an additional centre is very important as many businesses, including traditional enterprises such as banks , are shifting their IT infrastructure to the cloud amid the pandemic.

Indonesia’s major cities, starting with Jakarta, formally entered a partial lockdown in late April, causing an uptick in demand for digital services including e-commerce, finance, online media, education and video games. All these services are lucrative markets for Alibaba.

However, rival tech behemoths Google and Amazon also plan to expand their cloud service subsidiaries in Indonesia, which is the single largest digital economy in Southeast Asia.

Google Cloud opened a new Jakarta region in late June, bringing its services closer to local customers, while Amazon Web Services plans to build a data centre in 2022.

Leon Chen said his company would also build a data scrubbing centre alongside the third data centre in Indonesia.

Source: VNA