Chinese retail and online giant Alibaba has opened two new Alibaba Cloud data-centres in the UK. They went online on Monday 22nd October.

According to Alibaba, the new sites have been opened due to increasing demand for cloud-computing in Europe. As well as allowing its clients to upgrade their digital infrastructure and boost efficiencies in their operations Alibaba Cloud will offer stronger disaster-recovery capabilities given the services are spread between the two centres.

“Using AI-powered and data-driven technology, our latest data centres will offer customers complete access to our wide range of cloud services from machine-learning capabilities to predictive data analytics, ensuring that we continue to offer an unparalleled level of service. We are incredibly proud to take this latest step in our continued investment in EMEA,” said Yeming Wang, general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Alibaba Cloud.

The UK data centres are the newest but not the first in Europe. There is already one in Frankfurt. The UK centre is similar to the German one in that it offers 24/7 on site support including both security and engineering, elastic computing, storage and database capabilities, network and application services and analytics, among other services.

Alibaba Cloud breaks its global coverage into regions, with availability zones spread out within them. Each availability zone has one or more data centres. In this case, the U.K., which sits in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, has two new availability zones and one data centre in each zone.

With its latest facilities in the UK, Alibaba Cloud now operates 52 availability zones in 19 regions around the world, including also the U.S., Australia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia and India. Established 2009, Alibaba Cloud is the world’s third-ranked infrastructure-as-a-service provider, behind only Amazon and Microsoft, according to research firm Gartner.