The Alibaba logo in Nantong [Photo/ntfabu.com]

China's tech giant Alibaba signed an agreement with Nantong Economic and Technological Development Area on May 28 to spend 15 billion yuan ($2.17 billion) expanding its cloud computing data center in the region.

The company decided to set up a cloud computing center in Nantong on Dec 18, 2017 with a total investment of 18 billion yuan. The project started construction on March 28, 2018 and was put into use in November 2019. Some 40,000 servers are currently operating at the center.

According to Gao Shanyuan, general manager of the IDC department of Alibaba, a data center is the most basic infrastructure for the development of a digital economy and Nantong, with its geological advantages, is well-suited as a data hub that can serve the eastern China region.

"The Nantong center is involved in all core businesses of the Alibaba Group, including e-commerce, cloud computing and finance. It is expected to grow into the group's largest data center in East China to support the business expansion in the next five years," said Gao.

In recent years, the Nantong Economic and Technological Development Area has strived to develop the big data industry and has established national level and provincial level data centers to achieve this goal.

It has also attracted a number of leading big data companies to start operations in the area and is aiming to build itself into a data hub in the Yangtze River Delta region.