Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group today announced the establishment of a new digital hub in Malaysia under the Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) initiative together with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corp (MDEC).
The new digital hub will play a key role in incubating startups in Malaysia as well as in other Asean countries, and accelerating the digital transformation of the region.
Raymond Ma, Head of ASEAN & ANZ, Alibaba Cloud
In Malaysia as well as in the ASEAN region, we are committed to building up a unified ecosystem that makes cloud computing more accessible to startups and SMEs. The new digital hub, alongside our other initiatives, will provide startups and SMEs with a comprehensive support network and an innovative suite of cloud services, helping them to succeed in the digital age.
Create @ Alibaba Cloud Startup Program
Along with the establishment of the new digital hub, the company also hosted the ASEAN division of its third annual Create @ Alibaba Cloud Startup program. Fifteen startups from across the ASEAN region - from countries such as Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia - contested and pitched their startup ideas.
The two winners for this year are CXS Analytics from Malaysia and Oceo Water from Singapore, who would be awarded the equivalent of US$50,000 and US$10,000 and would go on to compete in the global final to be held in Shanghai in October.
Previous Successful Startups
Among the winners in the previous Alibaba Cloud Startup program includes XtalPi, a pharmaceutical technology company that won the competition in 2016. XtalPi provides cloud-based computational drug solid state research technologies for small-molecule drugs. After taking home USD216,000 in cloud resource credits, the U.S.-based pharma-tech company utilized Alibaba Cloud’s computing capabilities to further optimize its innovative solutions for drug solid-form screening and designing. XtalPi has recently won a contract with a top pharmaceutical company and expects to close its Series B financing round soon.
New Alibaba Cloud Data Center in Malaysia
In May, the Group announced that it was planning to build a data center in Malaysia which will be the country’s first global public cloud platform and Alibaba’s 15th data center.
