Alibaba Cloud is to invest an additional 200 billion yuan ($28.2bn) into its cloud infrastructure during the next three years to help businesses in China overcome the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the South China Morning Post, the company will invest on technologies such as operating systems, servers, chips and networks, as part of building next-generation data centres.

“By increasing our investment on cloud infrastructure and fundamental technologies, we hope to continue providing world-class, trusted computing resources to help businesses speed up the recovery process,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, in a statement.

Alibaba, alongside its cloud computing arm, has already put together various packages to help businesses during the coronavirus crisis. The Alibaba Foundation and Jack Ma Foundation launched Global MediXchange for Combating Covid-19 in March, a project which – with the support of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Alibaba Health – helped ‘facilitate continued communication and collaboration across borders, as well as to provide the necessary computing capabilities and data intelligence to empower pivotal research efforts.’

Prior to the global outbreak, Alibaba Cloud had offered credits to organisations in China enabling them to buy its Elastic Compute Service and certain cybersecurity services. Alongside this, the company made its AI-powered platform freely available to research institutions working on treating and preventing coronavirus. This move was praised in a Canalys report, which argued Chinese cloud companies were quick to act and get resources available to businesses who needed it.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has posed additional stress on the overall economy across sectors, but it also steers us to put more focus on the digital economy,” added Zhang.

Picture credit: Alibaba

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