Alibaba Group is preparing to launch in Russia its cloud platform, ‘Alibaba Cloud,’ reports Kommersant.

According to the business daily’s sources, Alibaba has occupied more than half of the capacity in the IXcellerate data center, which can accommodate about 1,500 racks. According to another source, Alibaba needs the platform to support its growing businesses in the region – AliExpress Russia (owned by Alibaba, Mail.ru Group, MegaFon and RDIF) and its logistics partner Cainiao Network.

In order to develop the cloud platform, the group registered “Alibaba Cloud (Ru)” LLC in November last year. On September 24, the company received the required licenses from Roskomnadzor, according to Kartoteka.ru database.

Alibaba Group and IXcellerate declined to comment.

According to Maxim Berezin from CROC Cloud Services, the Russian market is crowded with offers from Western, Asian and domestic companies, and it will be difficult for new players to occupy a significant share. According to Nikolay Bogaty, Marketing Director of SberCloud, the prices of cloud services in Russia are much lower than in the other countries of the world, and the launch of Alibaba Cloud with its global list of prices is unlikely to capture the interest of companies in Russia.

At the same time, global cloud platforms still surpass Russian ones in terms of the number of services and their functionality, says Dmitry Yashin, CEO of ActiveCloud Russia (part of Softline Group).

Chinese cloud companies became interested in the Russian market last year. In February 2019, it was reported that the large Internet holding Tencent had installed more than 600 racks with equipment at the IXcellerate site in Moscow in order to comply with the data localization law and provide cloud services in Russia. Meanwhile, Huawei planned to enter the top 3 players in the Russian cloud services market.