Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has opened a new campus for its cloud computing unit, Alibaba Cloud, in its home city of Hangzhou. Per the South China Morning Post, which Alibaba owns, the 10-building, 2.1 million-square-foot campus is roughly the size of the 2 million-square-foot campus for Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, aka the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.
Alibaba Cloud also highlighted the campus’s “eco-friendly designs” in a video, “including a photovoltaic power generation system, flowerpots made from recycled plastic, and high-efficiency, low-energy devices in the on-site coffee shop,” according to SCMP.
The new campus signals the firm’s commitment to investing in its growing cloud computing business. While Alibaba’s net income dropped 50% year-over-year in the second quarter to 22.74 billion yuan ($3.4 billion), Alibaba Cloud experienced the fastest growth among all of Alibaba’s business segments in Q2, making up 9% of total revenue.
The new facilities also come at a time when China’s economy has been facing a slowdown. While China’s economy is slowing down, Alibaba’s cloud computing unit has been eyeing expansion opportunities overseas. For example, Alibaba Cloud announced last month a $1 billion commitment to upgrading its global partner ecosystem.
Alibaba is currently the third-largest holding in EMQQ Global’s flagship exchange-traded fund, the Emerging Markets Internet & Ecommerce ETF (NYSEArca: EMQQ) with a weighting of 7.01% as of October 14. EMQQ seeks to offer investors exposure to the growth in internet and e-commerce activities in the developing world as middle classes expand and affordable smartphones provide unprecedentedly large swaths of the population with access to the internet for the first time, according to the issuer.
EMQQ tracks an index of leading internet and e-commerce companies that includes online retail, search engines, social networking, online video, e-payments, online gaming, and online travel.
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