Alibaba brings GPUs and SSDs to its growing public cloud

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba today announced the debut of 14 new services in its Aliyun public cloud.

New servers that pack fast-acting solid-state drives (SSDs) are among the new offerings, alongside servers with graphics processing units (GPUs), according to a statement from the company. Such services can solidify Alibaba’s position in the growing public cloud market, particularly in China.

Even so, Alibaba is largely playing catch-up. Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services offers both SSD-backed servers and GPU instances. Google and Microsoft, which are considered the two other top cloud providers globally, both have SSD support but currently lack GPU services.

An Alibaba spokesperson did not immediately have details on the specifications of the SSDs and GPUs.

Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in a major initial public offering last year. In March, Alibaba launched its first cloud data center based in the U.S.