A girl stands in front of the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in May, 2021. (Photo/Agencies)

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese tech heavyweight Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, announced on Thursday it will invest 7 billion yuan ($1 billion) to upgrade its global partner ecosystem over the next three fiscal years, and establish six service centers across the globe, as the company ratchets up its international expansion.

The investment will consist of both financial and non-financial incentives, such as funding, rebates and go-to-market initiatives, to support partners' technology innovation and market expansion, Alibaba Cloud said.

Partners have always been a key focus for Alibaba Cloud, and the company is committed to providing them with strong support both technologically and commercially, said Selina Yuan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International president, at the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit held in Phuket, Thailand.

The company will set up six service centers worldwide, including Porto, Mexico City and Kuala Lumpur, to support customers in their cloud adoption journey, providing timely and regionalized cloud migration and consulting services.

In the past year, it has added seven overseas data centers in South Korea, Thailand, Germany, Indonesia, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia.

During the summit, Alibaba Cloud has inked nearly 30 agreements to help customers and partners accelerate their digital innovation capabilities with leading cloud computing technologies.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4 percent in 2022 to total $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021, according to the latest forecast from consulting firm Gartner. Alibaba Cloud maintained its position as the third-largest public cloud IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, provider globally since 2018, according to market consultancy IDC.

Editor: Tan Qikuan