Alibaba Cloud has set its sights on recruiting 5,000 tech workers from across the globe to join the company over the next 10 months in support of its datacentre expansion plans.
The Chinese public cloud challenger said it was specifically looking to bring on board individuals with expertise in networking, database servers and artificial intelligence (AI) between now and the end of its financial year on 31 March 2021.
These individuals would assist the company with its previously announced plan to invest $28bn over the next three years in creating the next-generation datacentres it needs to underpin its burgeoning global cloud operations.
In a press statement, the president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and chief technology officer (CTO) for the wider Alibaba Group, Jeff Zhang, said this investment was necessary to ensure the company could continue to provide computing resources to the world to see it through the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
“By increasing our investment in cloud infrastructure and fundamental technologies, we hope to continue providing world-class, trusted computing resources to help businesses speed up the recovery process, and offer cloud-based intelligent solutions to support their digital transformation in the post-pandemic world,” he added.
In an updated statement, Zhang said ramping up its recruitment efforts was an essential next step in this process, as businesses in China and other countries are now responding to the pandemic by seeking to ramp up their digital transformation efforts.
“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”
Jeff Zhang, Alibaba Group
“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,” he said.
“In 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. 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.”
Until the onset of the pandemic, the company has spent the past few years trying to replicate the hold it has on the public cloud market in its native China across the world, which has seen it open datacentres in Europe and Australia.
According to recent figures from market watcher Gartner, Alibaba Cloud is the third largest infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider in the world, with around 7.7% share, but still has some way to go to catch up with Microsoft (15.5%) and Amazon Web Services (47.8%).
Part of its world domination efforts have also seen the firm embark on other skills initiatives along the way, including the formation of an academy in 2017 that sought to bolster the availability of individuals with skills in machine learning, natural language processing, human-to-machine interactions and financial technology.
This work has, in turn, resulted in the roll-out of additional functionality to the wider Alibaba Cloud portfolio, including speech and image search capabilities.
