Hangzhou, Zhejiang , where Alibaba Cloud is headquartered.

The deal was signed in Thailand in September, which was presumably seen as some kind of neutral ground, and a photograph of the signing ceremony shows a host of people, including Jonas Bogoshi, BCX CEO, flanked by Selina Yuan, Alibaba group vice president, while the dumpling-shaped Alibaba cloud mascot Yun Xiao Bao hovered nearby. Also in the picture were Julian Liebenberg, BCX chief of cloud platform solutions, and Jan Bouwer, the chief of digital platform solutions. They told Brainstorm recently how they see the new cloud service fitting into their business plans.

Clearly, the Alibaba entrance is a big deal. It’s one of the world’s largest hyperscalers with about 5% of the global market, and it says it’s in the top three globally as far as Infrastructure-as-a-Service is concerned. It also says it’s the leading IaaS provider by revenue in Asia-Pacific, with around a quarter of the market. Worldwide, it now has 86 availability zones in 28 regions, and it’s expected to build a pair of datacentres in South Africa next year, adding to the ones it built in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Thailand and South Korea in 2022. Its cloud division brought in around $3.870 million for the quarter at the end of last year. But the company has also faced regulatory pressures from Beijing, and was hamstrung, like many other Chinese firms, by the country’s strict pandemic lockdowns. Then there’s the matter of the growing animosity between the United States and China, and there were reports last year that the US wanted to know how the company was storing US clients’ data.