(Yicai) Oct. 14 -- Alibaba Cloud is lowering the prices of one of its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings by as much as 10.2 percent in specific international markets, as the cloud computing arm of Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group Holding ramps up its overseas expansion efforts.

Alibaba Cloud will drop the prices of products offered under its Elastic Compute Service -- which provides high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable virtual cloud servers -- in Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Dubai on Oct. 30, according to the Hangzhou-based firm’s website.

While the scope of the cuts is limited, it reveals Alibaba Cloud’s determination to expand abroad, an industry insider told Yicai. Country-specific pricing for ECS is normal, but these discounts point to a more targeted, market-by-market push by Alibaba Cloud, the person added.

Take Frankfurt as an example. The city is a key gateway for Alibaba Cloud in Europe and it will benefit from the biggest discounts. The company chose to set up its first European cloud center in the city in 2016 and it opened its third data center in Germany in 2022, also in Frankfurt.

Alibaba Cloud ranks fourth in the global cloud computing market, behind Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, according to data from US market research firm Gartner. Having already secured the top spot in the Asia-Pacific region, an important challenge for Alibaba Cloud’s overseas expansion is how to spur growth in other regions amid artificial intelligence boom.

Asia is one of Alibaba Cloud’s key markets, while the fast-growing digital, cloud computing, and AI markets in Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe present new opportunities for the company, Yuan Qian, who was president of its international business, told Yicai in July.

Last month, Alibaba Cloud set out a new plan for global infrastructure expansion at its Aspara Conference, an annual global tech summit. The firm will set up cloud computing regions in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands for the first time, and increase the size of its data centers in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Dubai, thereby ramping up its presence in the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.

“In the future, there may only be five or six super-scale cloud computing platforms in the world,” Alibaba Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said at the conference. The new AI computing era will require denser computing power, faster networks, and larger clusters, he pointed out.

Alibaba Cloud may already be positioning itself for even stiffer competition among the world’s leading cloud services providers.

Editor: Kim Taylor