Alibaba to pump £22bn into cloud after COVID-19 tech surge

The money will fund the development of operating systems, semiconductors and building new datacentres

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has revealed plans to invest 200 billion yuan (£22bn) into its cloud arm over the next three years following a coronavirus-fuelled boom in demand for its services.

The figure represents over half of the group's revenues for 2019, which was 376.8 billion yuan (£42.8bn).

The investment will be spent on developing its semiconductors and operating systems, as well as building more datacentres. It currently operates 21 global datacentre regions across APAC, the Middle East, Europe and the US.

The Chinese behemoth has reported a surge in demand for its cloud services and applications caused by the pandemic.

Alibaba Cloud saw its revenues grow 62 per cent year-on-year to hit 10.7 billion yuan (£1.2bn) in its recent Q4 earnings.

The unit held a 46 per cent share of the Chinese cloud market last year, followed by Tencent Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Baidu Cloud, according to data from Canalys.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has posed additional stress on the overall economy across sectors, but it also steers us to put more focus on the digital economy," stated Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

"By increasing our investment in cloud infrastructure and fundamental technologies, we hope to continue providing world-class, trusted computing resources to help businesses speed up the recovery process."