Alibaba will spend $1B to expand its cloud in Japan, Europe, and the Middle East

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba today announced plans to spend $1 billion on its Aliyun public cloud. The money will cover the costs of setting up new data center infrastructure in Japan, Singapore, Europe, and the Middle East, according to a statement on the news.

The news comes after Alibaba launched its first data center in the U.S. in March. Meanwhile, in China and Hong Kong, Aliyun maintains five data centers, according to today’s statement.

If you go to Aliyun’s homepage, you won’t see much English. But it’s clear that the cloud subsidiary of Alibaba is gaining greater adoption globally, though that increase is still mostly in non-English-speaking markets.

In pursuing geographical expansion — as well as a wider selection of compute and storage options — Alibaba is following a cloud strategy similar to that of market leader Amazon Web Services, as well as those of Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

While those companies have been picking up a considerable amount of cloud business in North America, it’s not impossible to imagine Aliyun gaining market share here as well as on other continents, beyond its base in Asia.