A fire broke out at an Alibaba Cloud data center in China on December 9.
As reported by China Fund News and others, a local posted a video to the Internet of the fire at an Alibaba data center in Yuancheng District, Heyuan City, Guangdong Province.
According to the post, the fire broke out on December 9, and "hundreds" fled from the building.
On its Weibo account, the company said: "After verification, at 2.43pm yesterday, during the general contracting process, a park under construction in Heyuan (not yet put into production) caused several extruded boards outside the building to catch fire due to high-temperature iron slag produced by cutting, which caused thick smoke.
"The fire was extinguished with a hose within about 10 minutes, causing no casualties or property losses. The park under construction is far away from the production area and has no impact on cloud services."
The event has not been recorded on the Alibaba Cloud Health Status page, presumably because it did not affect an operational data center.
Alibaba's Guangdong Cloud Computing Data Center Heyuan project is, according to public data, expected to see an investment of up to 15 billion yuan ($2.06bn) and will comprise three data center campuses in Heyuan Yuancheng District, Jiangdong New District, and the High-tech Zone. It is expected to be fully completed in 2028.
The Heyuan Data Center has been operational since early 2020.
Earlier this year, Alibaba experienced a fire at its operational data center in Singapore. The fire incident occurred in Availability Zone C of its Singapore region and caused a ByteDance outage. The data center in question was the Digital Realty SIN11 facility.
Alibaba to build new data centers in five countries globally
On December 11, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Internation president Yuan Qian announced plans for the company's global expansion.
Over the next three years, Alibaba Cloud will build data centers in five countries outside of China - South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Mexico.
The company also plans to expand its existing points of presence.
Currently, the Chinese cloud provider operates 85 availability zones in 28 regions worldwide including in China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.
In addition to building new data centers, the company plans to also offer AI technologies and products overseas.
While looking to expand in new locations, earlier this year Alibaba announced it would be exiting its data centers in Australia and India. At the time, the company said: "As part of Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure strategy update, following careful assessment, we have decided to cease operations at our data centers in Australia and India while enhancing our investment in the Southeast Asia and Mexico. We recommend you to migrate your business to Alibaba Cloud region in Singapore or other regions at your earliest opportunity.”
Alibaba Cloud released its Q3 2024 earnings in November 2024, posting revenue of RMB29.6 billion ($4.2 bn), and noting that its adjusted EBITA increased by 89 percent to RMB 2.7 billion ($372.75m), while the adjusted EBITA margin increased four percentage points to nine percent YoY.
