Alibaba Cloud will roll out its big-data service, called “MaxCompute,” in Europe in the second half of 2017 to tap into growing demand for data-processing and analytics from local enterprises.
MaxCompute is a big-data platform that allows users to store and process massive amounts of data, including images, video and audio with storage demands as high as terabyte, or even petabyte level. Alibaba Cloud said a single MaxCompute cluster could scale up to 10,000 servers.
Through MaxCompute, European businesses will be able to access Alibaba Cloud’sadvanced artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technologies and algorithms for data storage, modeling and analytics.
“ET Brain,” Alibaba Cloud’s AI program, has been used in China to help tackle real-worldproblems, such as easing traffic congestion with real-time traffic predictions, diagnosing disease through medical imaging and predicting the winner of a popular Chinese singing reality show.
“Europe has always been an industrial and societal pioneer, and today it continues to nurture creativity and innovation for this digitalizing planet. As one of the world’s leading cloud providers, Alibaba Cloud will assist European enterprises to unlock the immense value of their data using a highly secure and scalable cloud infrastructure and AI programs,” said Wanli Min, an Alibaba Cloud scientist responsible for AI and data-mining scientist.
The announcement from Alibaba Cloud came atParis VivaTech, a technology innovation summit being hosted in the French capital from June 15-17. The summit has over 50,000 attendees, including 5,000 start-ups, 1,000 investors and 7,000 CEOs. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang is due to speak at the event on June 16.
Todrive its cloud computing and big data business in Europe, Alibaba Cloud has been working closely with regional partners. Alibaba Cloud opened its first data center in Europe in November 2016 with telecommunications company Vodafone Germany.
As one of fastest-growing cloud computing companies in the world, Alibaba Cloud operates 15 data centers, including ones in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Middle East, North America and Europe. It served 874, 000 paying customers as of March 31.
