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Chinese dragon Alibaba ramps up cloud war with second US data center

China cloud unit pushes deeper into Silicon Valley

Chinese cloud purveyor Aliyun, a division of the Middle Kingdom's Amazon equivalent Alibaba, has opened its second US data center in Silicon Valley.

The move is part of its international expansion plans, with the company having earlier this year signed up a raft of international partners to flog its services globally.

Alibaba's chief executive Daniel Zhang underlined globalization as the company's number one priority earlier this year. The company has also said it will pour $1bn (£653m) into its cloud computing push.

The new data center will be Alibaba's ninth globally and the fourth announced in 2015, after its first US data center was opened in March 2015.

Ethan Sicheng Yu, veep of the internationally-branded AliCloud, said: "Our second US data center is situated in Silicon Valley, which is the epicenter for technology innovation world-wide."

Alibaba's main tactic of achieving global domination will be to hop into bed with local partners and flog its services to Chinese customers doing business abroad.

Its latest global partners include Mesosphere, Bankware Global, Appcara, Appnovation, Cloud Comrade, and Panzura.

In June, it announced partnerships with chipzilla Intel, data center outfit Equinix, and French website hosting and cloud services provider Linkbynet. This is the first wave of partners to join Aliyun in its plans for cloud world domination.

Yu added that the company expects to announce more partnerships as it extends globally.

However, the US has a somewhat problematic relationship with Chinese companies – having banned Huawei from bidding for US government contracts because of concerns over spying.

The topic of China's supposedly widespread practice of industrial espionage was top of the agenda in a recent landmark meeting between US Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and all the big names of Silicon Valley. ®

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