Alibaba Cloud Brings ‘MaxCompute’ Big Data Service To Europe

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, will bring its ‘MaxCompute’ big data service  in Europe in the second half of 2017.

The platform allows customers to store and process large amounts of structured and unstructured data such as images, videos and audio files, with a single MaxCompute cluster able to scale up to 10,000 servers.

And it will set users back just $1.44 (£1.13) per TB, a world record in 2016 for the lowest computing cost.

Data crunching

With the launch, European businesses will be able to make use of a range of data intelligence services, including data processing, analytics and machine learning-based tools.

Alibaba will also be hoping its platform will help bolster innovation in the region in fields such as deep learning and big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), which has already proved fruitful in Chinese cities in tackling issues such as traffic congestion and traffic light management.

“Europe has always been an industrial and societal pioneer, and today it continues to nurture creativity and innovation for this digitalizing planet,” said Wanli Min, AI and data mining scientist at Alibaba Cloud.

“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.”

Alibaba is not the only company to have upped its European investment in 2017. Since the turn of the year, Barclays, for example, opened the doors to Europe’s largest fintech startup site in London and Oracle introduced its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform to Germany.

Just this week Huawei pledged to continue its investment in European digital infrastructure, all of which shows that the tech scene in the region is very much alive and well.

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