HANGZHOU, July 17 — What researchers found when they looked at Alibaba’s latest spending plans is a company that appears to be betting its future on cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence. The Chinese e-commerce giant, which launched its cloud arm Alibaba Cloud in September 2009, has announced it will spend a large amount on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years. That figure is described by Alibaba’s CEO as the largest such investment the company has made to date.
The money is slated for specific items including GPU-like accelerators and large-scale data centers. These will support both internal workloads and external client functions, underscoring Alibaba’s pivot from e-commerce to cloud infrastructure.
The CEO has explained that the company expects much of its internal AI workload to run on Alibaba Cloud.
How cloud storage works
The science behind cloud storage is rooted in a model where data is stored remotely in logical pools and accessed over a network, typically the internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers, sometimes in multiple locations, and the physical environment is owned and managed by a cloud computing provider. These providers are responsible for keeping data available and accessible, and the physical environment secured and running.
Cloud storage is based on highly virtualized infrastructure. It shares characteristics with broader cloud computing: near-instant elasticity and scalability, multi-tenancy, and metered resources.
Services can be used from an off-premises service like Amazon S3 or deployed on-premises like ViON Capacity Services. There are three types of cloud storage: hosted object storage, file storage, and block storage. Each offers its own unique advantages.
Alibaba Cloud’s object storage service, or OSS, is a fully managed example. Other object storage services that can be hosted and deployed with cloud storage characteristics include Amazon S3, Oracle Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure Storage, as well as object storage software like Openstack Swift, systems like EMC Atmos, EMC ECS, and Hitachi Content Platform, and distributed storage research projects like OceanStore and VISION Cloud.
A brief history of the cloud
Cloud computing is believed to have been invented by J. C. R.
Licklider in the 1960s with his work on ARPANET to connect people and data from anywhere at any time. In 1983, CompuServe offered its consumer users a small amount of disk space to store any files they chose to upload.
In 1994, AT&T launched PersonaLink Services, an online platform for personal and business communication and entrepreneurship. The storage was one of the first to be all web-based, and was referenced in commercials with the phrase, “you can think of our electronic meeting place as the cloud.” Amazon Web Services introduced its cloud storage service Amazon S3 in 2006, and it gained widespread recognition as the storage supplier to popular services such as SmugMug, Dropbox, and Pinterest.
In 2005, Box announced an online file sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses. Alibaba Cloud was launched in September 2009, three years after AWS.
Market leaders and market share
As of 2024, Gartner ranked cloud storage platforms as follows: AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, Huawei, and Tencent. These eight companies account for a large share of the global cloud services market. The ranking was based on ability to execute in the market and innovation vision.
In 2023, a large share of China’s technology companies and half of AI large language model companies ran on Alibaba Cloud. In the US, dominance belonged to AWS with a large share.
What to watch next is whether Alibaba’s massive spending on cloud and AI infrastructure will shift the competitive landscape. Data centers are also set to expand, and AI models like Qwen are part of the plan. Alibaba’s CEO has framed the investment as the largest to date on cloud and AI, signalling that the company’s identity may increasingly be defined by infrastructure rather than online shopping.
Sources
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