Alibaba Cloud has more than doubled its capacity in its cloud data centers in Hong Kong, according to a report on Alizila, a news hub for the Alibaba Group.

The Hong Kong expansion is part of Alibaba Cloud’s strategy to expand its global network coverage, and the additional capacity is expected to boost the company’s ability to meet demand for high availability and disaster recovery cloud services in the regional financial hub.

Alibaba Group Headquarters

Cloud expansion

”Since our entry into Hong Kong in 2014, Alibaba Cloud has become one of the largest public cloud providers in the market in less than two years,” said Ethan Yu, vice president of Alibaba Group and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global in a statement. “More companies have come to realize the importance of changing their traditional IT mind-set to embrace the new data technology.”

Alibaba Cloud is China’s largest cloud platform with revenue of $254 million in 4Q last year, and has embarked on a rapid expansion of its cloud platform around the globe since launching its first data centers in the United States and Singapore.

Today, Alibaba Cloud operates data centers at 14 locations, including Japan, Australia, Singapore in the Asia region. In a separate report carried by the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post, a spokesperson noted that the Alibaba Cloud is the only cloud provider with more than one availability zone in Hong Kong.

While this certainly puts Alibaba Cloud ahead in terms in offering businesses the option of building resilient services by architecting them on top of the availability zones in Hong Kong, competitor Singapore is actually ahead when it comes to the availability of multi-zone public cloud platforms.

Alibaba Cloud also has two separate availability zones in the rival data center hub, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long since operated from two availability zones. Notably, Google Cloud opened its first cloud zone on the island state in 2014, and is on track to launch its second data center by the first half of 2017 – effectively allowing it to offer two zones.