Alibaba Opens Data Centre In Indonesia

Alibaba's cloud computing unit has opened a data centre in Indonesia, where it is looking to train 300 local professionals in its cloud certification programme within a year.

The Chinese tech giant said the new facility was the country's first global public cloud and would provide a platform for enterprise customers that required low latency or must store and process data locally.

The Indonesian site would offer Alibaba Cloud's range of products and services, including its big data offering called MaxCompute, which encompassed data intelligence services such as analytics and machine learning.

Touting the company as a global cloud provider that originated from Asia, Alibaba Cloud's Asia-Pacific general manager Alex Li said it was "uniquely positioned with cultural and contextual advantages" to deliver services for customers in this region.

Alibaba added that the new data centre would further support the Indonesian government's plans to create 1,000 startups by 2020.

The vendor said it was targeting to train 300 and certify 100 locals through its Alibaba Cloud Certified Professional programme within a year.

Its clientele in Indonesia included online marketplace Tokopedia, which currently operated 20 applications as well as several managed services on Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud last June had said it would open data centres in Indonesia and India as part of efforts to expand its coverage in Asia-Pacific, pushing its data centre footprint to 17 locations worldwide including Singapore, Japan, Australia, Germany, and its domestic Chinese market.

Earlier this month, it also added quantum computing services on its public cloud, which it said ran on a processor with 11 quantum bits (qubits) of power.