Aliyun the cloud computing subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba has formally opened its third globally focused data center in Beijing.

This is the company’s third facility that focuses on global services – the other data centers are located in Hangzhou and Qingdao.

Its Beijing facility will provide 10,000 physical servers for its first phase and will mainly serve clients in the Beijing and North China region.

Aliyun said its major customers include government research institutions, financial organizations and start-ups.

The Beijing facility will provide four main cloud offerings - cloud server ECS, relational database service RDS, open storage service OSS and a load balancing service SLB.

It said the opening of the cloud data center will offer more network node options to users which will further enhance its reliability and speed of response for multi-user application service distribution.

Alibaba’s CTO Wang Jian said cloud computing will become the big data era of economic and social development of new infrastructure.

“As traditional industries rely on electricity from the national grid, cloud computing can provide a steady stream of power for the future of the economy,” Jian said.

Phase two of the build – its South China engine room - is expected to open in the second half of 2014.

On Tuesday it was confirmed that Alibaba had filed documents for its New York Stock Exchange inital public offering. Analysts believe the stocks could raise in excess of US$15bn.