(Yicai) Nov. 3 -- Alibaba Cloud has built Senegal’s first dedicated Olympic cloud infrastructure to support the ongoing 2026 Dakar Youth Olympic Games, the first Olympic event to be held on African soil, as the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings seeks to capture a larger share of overseas markets by showcasing its technologies and capabilities through high-profile international sporting events.

The private cloud will be handed over to Senegal in its entirety after the Games and converted into a national cloud platform to support the country’s ongoing digital development needs, according to the project plan. As Chinese cloud service providers accelerate their overseas expansion, the delivery of a cloud platform for a major sporting event in Africa is emerging as a strategic opportunity for Chinese vendors to establish a foothold in the international private cloud market.

““If we’re talking about this project alone, we might just manage to break even,” Liu Guohua, vice president of Alibaba Cloud, recently told Yicai and other media outlets. “However, revenue from Alibaba Cloud’s international private cloud business nearly doubled in the first half, significantly outpacing growth in the Chinese market.”

Alibaba Cloud is providing cloud-based broadcasting for the Games, as well as supporting a ticketing system capable of handling millions of tickets, electronic visa processing and a one-stop service platform for athletes, Liu said. The Hangzhou-based company has also helped Senegal transition from paper-based visas to electronic visas. All these systems run on the dedicated Olympic cloud infrastructure built by Alibaba Cloud for the event.

Unlike public cloud services, which allow customers to access shared computing resources, private clouds are deployed in environments designated by individual clients and tailored to their specific requirements.

Alibaba Cloud does not yet have a public cloud node in Senegal. Taking into account the country's power supply and network infrastructure, the company's private cloud team will deploy the cloud computing operating system in a local environment for this Youth Olympic Games. After the event, the entire platform will be handed over to the Senegalese government and repurposed as the country's national cloud.

Rather than simply selling cloud resources, Alibaba Cloud is using major sporting events as an opportunity to package its technology and capabilities into comprehensive cloud platforms, positioning itself to capture a larger share of overseas markets.

"It is not that many countries are unwilling to adopt advanced technology but rather that they do not know how to use it or how to make it part of their own national technological infrastructure," Liu said.

The rising emphasis on data control and digital infrastructure in various countries is creating new opportunities in the cloud market. US market research firm Gartner predicts that global spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure-as-a-service will surge 35.6 percent this year from last year to reach USD80 billion. This is about three times the growth rate of the overall private cloud market. Sovereign cloud IaaS expenditure in the Middle East and Africa is estimated to soar 89 percent this year.

"International business may still account for less than 5 percent of our entire private cloud business, but the resources allocated to it are close to 50 percent of the whole sector's total investment," Liu said.

Building a stronger competitive position in the rapidly expanding overseas private cloud market is becoming a key strategic focus for cloud service providers, he added.

Editor: Kim Taylor