# Alibaba Cloud Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is the cloud computing subsidiary of Alibaba Group, offering a wide range of services including elastic compute, data storage, and big-data processing. It is the largest cloud provider in China and Asia Pacific, and develops the Qwen series of open-weight large language models. Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun (Chinese: 阿里云; pinyin: Ālǐyún; lit. 'Ali Cloud'), is a cloud computing company and a subsidiary of Alibaba Group. It provides cloud computing services to online businesses and Alibaba's own e-commerce ecosystem. Its international operations are registered and headquartered in Singapore. Alibaba Cloud offers cloud services on a pay-as-you-go basis, including elastic compute, data storage, relational databases, big-data processing, DDoS protection, and content delivery networks (CDN). The company also develops the Qwen series of open-weights large language models, positioning itself as a significant player in the field of [artificial-intelligence](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/artificial-intelligence). It is the largest cloud computing company in China and in Asia Pacific, according to Gartner. As of June 2017, Alibaba Cloud was placed in the Visionaries' quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service, worldwide. ## History Alibaba Cloud was founded in September 2009, with research and development centers and operation centers opened in Hangzhou, Beijing, and Silicon Valley. ### 2010–2013 In November 2010, the company supported the first Single's Day (11.11) Taobao shopping festival, handling 2.4 billion page views in 24 hours. Two years later, in November 2012, it became the first Chinese cloud service provider to pass ISO27001:2005, an information security management standard. In January 2013, Alibaba Cloud merged with HiChina, founded by Xiangning Zhang, for the www.net.cn business, one of the largest acquisitions in the company's history at the time. In August of that year, the ApsaraDB architecture supported 5000 physical machines in a single cluster. ### 2014–2017 The company's Hong Kong data center went online in May 2014. In December 2014, Alibaba Cloud defended a 14-hour-long DDoS attack that peaked at 453.8 Gbit/s. In July 2015, Alibaba Group invested US$1 billion in Alibaba Cloud. A month later, Alibaba Cloud's first Singapore data center opened, and Singapore was announced as Alibaba Cloud's overseas headquarters. Two US data centers went online in October 2015. That same month, MaxCompute took the lead in the Sort Benchmark, sorting 100 TB of data in 377 seconds, compared with Apache Spark's previous record of 1406 seconds. The Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference was also held in October 2015 in Hangzhou, attracting over 20,000 developers. In November 2015, the company supported the 11.11 shopping festival with a record of $14.2 billion in transactions in 24 hours. Alibaba Cloud partnered with SK Holdings C&C in April 2016 to provide cloud services to Korean and Chinese companies. A month later, the company formalized a joint venture with SoftBank to launch cloud services in Japan. In June 2016, Alibaba Cloud expanded its data center operations in Singapore with a second availability zone. The company also achieved two new certifications: the Singapore Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) standard Level 3 and the Payment Card Industry Three-Domain Secure (PCI 3DS). In November 2016, Alibaba Cloud partnered with Vodafone Germany for data center operations and to provide cloud services to German and European companies. Alibaba became the official cloud services provider of the Olympics in January 2017. In February 2017, the company became a founding member of the EU Cloud Code of Conduct. In June 2017, Alibaba Cloud was placed in the Visionaries quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide. Alibaba Cloud partnered with Malaysia's Fusionex in September 2017 to provide cloud solutions in Southeast Asia, and its Malaysia data center commenced operations in October. That same month, the company partnered with Elastic and launched Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch. Alibaba Cloud's India data center commenced operations in December 2017. Additionally, Alibaba Cloud received the C5 standard certification from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) for its data centers in Germany and Singapore. ### 2018–2021 In February 2018, Alibaba Cloud's Indonesia data center commenced operations. The company's first data center in the Philippines opened in June 2021. In October 2021, Alibaba Cloud unveiled the ARM-based Yitian 710 chip, designed in-house, for use in its data centers. On November 24, 2021, the Log4Shell bug was disclosed to Apache by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's Security Team. On December 22, 2021, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology suspended a partnership with Alibaba Cloud for "failure in reporting cybersecurity vulnerabilities" related to the Log4Shell bug. ### 2022 In September 2022, Alibaba Cloud announced a $1 billion pledge to upgrade its global partner ecosystem. ## Data Center Regions Alibaba Cloud operates data centers in 29 regions and 87 availability zones globally. The data center in Germany is operated by Vodafone Germany in Frankfurt and is certified with C5. The company's global footprint supports its position as a leading cloud provider in Asia Pacific and beyond. ## Products Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing services across IaaS, PaaS, DBaaS, and SaaS, including services such as e-commerce, big data, database, IoT, object storage (OSS), Kubernetes, and data customization. These services can be managed from the Alibaba web page or using the aliyun command line tool. AnalyticDB, a data warehousing service, was first released in May 2018, with version 3.0 released in 2019. On April 26, 2019, TPC published the TPC-DS benchmark results for AnalyticDB. In 2019, a paper about the system design of AnalyticDB was published at the VLDB conference. In addition to its core cloud services, Alibaba Cloud has developed the Qwen series of open-weights large language models. These models are part of the broader [generative-ai](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/generative-ai) landscape, competing with offerings from companies like [openai](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/openai), [anthropic](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/anthropic), and [google-deepmind](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/google-deepmind). The Qwen models are designed for a variety of tasks, including natural language understanding and generation, and are available for developers and enterprises to integrate into their applications. ## Academic Partners Alibaba Cloud maintains academic alliances with several universities and institutions, including: - Shanghai Jiao Tong University - Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) - University of Malaya - Hong Kong Shue Yan University - Macao University of Science and Technology - Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) - Télécom Paris - SUPINFO International University - Université de technologie sino-européenne de l'université de Shanghai - Gadjah Mada University - Universitas Prasetiya Mulya - Bina Nusantara University - Krida Wacana Christian University - Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education - Nanyang Polytechnic - Republic Polytechnic - Sekolah Tinggi Teknologi Informasi NIIT - Usman Institute of Technology - AISSMS Institute of Information Technology These partnerships aim to foster research and development in cloud computing and related fields, including [machine-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/machine-learning) and [deep-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/deep-learning). ## Controversy On October 26, 2016, Zhang Kai, CEO of ITHome, issued an announcement stating he could no longer tolerate Alibaba Cloud's overselling and service interruption issues and had migrated the hosting entirely to Baidu Cloud. Alibaba Cloud subsequently issued an apology letter, but indirectly mentioned that website performance should consider system architecture and avoid single-point design. ## References (References omitted per instructions) ## External Links (External links omitted per instructions) --- Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/alibaba-cloud License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) Last updated: 2026-09-05T14:06:21.884125+00:00