Recently, Alibaba Cloud opened two new data centers in the UK, with the goal of expanding its business to Europe.

In 2016, the cloud computing division of the Chinese retail giant has opened data centers in Frankfurt and Dubai. Alibaba said that the new London data center will provide services such as elastic computing, storage, databases, networking, application services and big data analysis, in response to the needs of European local facilities.

Alibaba is either the third largest cloud computing provider or the fourth largest cloud computing provider, depending on the data set you see. It is China’s largest public cloud service provider-a difficult market for foreign technology companies that are not allowed to operate cloud computing infrastructure. Last year, in order to comply with local laws, Amazon Web Services sold some of its Chinese infrastructure to local partners.

According to Alibaba, there are currently 52 available zones (composed of one or more data centers with independent power, cooling and networking) in 19 regions around the world.  Through many industries, from retail to logitics, the Internet of Things, entertainment and cloud computing, the company is in many ways very similar to other retail cloud giants Amazon.

The company’s first customers in Europe wanted to use it as a way to enter China and help them navigate through the system so that their business could be launched and operated. Chinese companies looking to do business in Europe have also used Alibaba.

But more and more cloud vendors are looking for a different selling point: Google Cloud is trying to position itself as a cloud in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning; Alibaba Cloud wants to be a vertical Industry experts, based on cloud technology, increasing business acumen in areas such as retail and finance.

“I believe this will drive our growth in this mature market. Today, people are not only looking forward to the migration of IT infrastructure, but also more business value,” said Wang Yiming, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Europe.

Alibaba’s cloud business revenue in the fourth quarter was $ 2.8 billion. The company’s cloud revenue is accelerating as it dominates China’s infrastructure services sector.