Alibaba has launched a new data center in Tokyo, Japan.
The company this week announced its Alibaba Cloud/Aliyun unit has launched its third data center in Japan to ‘support the transformation demands’ from customers.
“The third data center launch underscores our continuous commitment to serving local Japanese customers’ digital transformation demands,” said Unique Song, General Manager of Japan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “With our proven innovations and competitive solutions that meet strict security and compliance requirements, we are determined in our mission to support our customers in the digital era.”
Alibaba Cloud now operates a network of 28 regions and 86 availability zones globally. 2022 has seen Alibaba also launch a data center in Bangkok, Thailand, and a third facility in Germany around Frankfurt.
The company said the new facility will provide a range of cloud computing products ranging from storage, network, elastic computing, security, and database offerings to developer services.
“With three data centers on the ground, Alibaba Cloud aims to offer Japanese customers high availability, exceptional resilience, and robust disaster recovery capabilities,” the company said in a post.
Alibaba launched its first Tokyo region in 2016. All of the major cloud providers have a presence in Japan. Microsoft has two Japanese Azure regions – Tokyo and Osaka – that both launched in 2014. AWS launched a Tokyo region in 2011, with an Osaka-based region opening last year. Google launched its first Japanese region in Tokyo in 2016, with Osaka coming in 2019.
Chinese cloud rival Tencent announced plans for a third Japanese data center in June 2022. Tencent currently operates 24 availability zones across 12 regions outside of mainland China. The company first announced plans to enter Japan in 2018, and launched a facility in Tokyo the following year. It added a second facility in Japan last year.