Alibaba boosts its investment in the 'cloud wars' against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft

By Jillian D'Onfro

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is upping its investment in cloud computing in the United States, making it more of a competitor to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft than ever before.

Alibaba's cloud division, Aliyun, has signed a series of new partnerships with the likes of Intel and data center company Equinix to localize its cloud offerings without having to build its own new data centers, CNBC's Arjun Kharpal reports.

The slew of partnerships, which Alibaba is calling its Marketplace Alliance Program, focuses on expanding its cloud services globally, not just the US. Besides Equinix and Intel, it also signed a deal with Singtel in Singapore.

Right now, cloud computing only constitutes a small chunk of Alibaba's $2.8 billion in revenue last quarter, but its new partnerships prove Aliyun doesn't plan to slow down.

"There are more and more storage problems and more and more clients are in need for bigger storage capabilities," president of Aliyun, Simon Hu, told CNBC.

Right now, Amazon is leading the pack in the US, making more revenue from its infrastructure services business, AWS, than its four closest competitors (Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, and Google) combined.

Alibaba has been taking notes.

"They are great role models for Aliyun and we want to learn from their strengths," Hu told CNBC.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.