The Silicon Review ^Asia

Businesses all over the world are facing a tough time to keep their operations running and protect their employees’ jobs. Many companies are struggling and many are miserably failing to do so. But Alibaba Cloud, the cloud platform of Alibaba seems to be handling the situation very well.  Alibaba Cloud plans to hire 5,000 employees globally over the next 10 months as the platform has witnessed a boost in demand for business softwares amid coronavirus-related lockdowns. The new employees will be recruited across networking, database, servers, chips and artificial intelligence and other verticals.

"The digital transformation journey for businesses in China, which was previously expected to take three to five years, is now likely to be accelerated to be completed within one year," said Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. "To move forward in full speed, we are not only building trusted cloud technologies and services, but also investing in worldwide IT talents who are pioneering the development of cutting-edge cloud and data intelligence technologies," he added.

The cloud computing giant plans to invest 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) over the next three years to build advanced data centers.

"In the light of the fast-growing demand of digital shift from global clients in all sectors, we are continuing with our commitment to offering world-class cloud services,'' Zhang said.

Alibaba Cloud has been ranked by Gartner as the largest cloud-computing service provider in the APAC region. The new hiring targets will impact its data centers across 63 zones in 21 regions including two in India.

In 2017, the Chinese e-commerce giant had set up the Alibaba DAMO Academy, which gathers global talent for fundamental technology research in areas such as machine intelligence, vision computing, natural language processing, human-machine interactions, internet of things (IoT) and financial technology.