Alibaba Group is holding talks with UK’s British Telecom (BT). The China-based tech giant will be partnering up with British Telecom similar to its partnership with Germany’s Vodafone to expand its market in Europe. Alibaba Cloud’s partnership in the UK will challenge the dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Europe.

Alibaba Cloud has came to terms with the IT department of British Telecom, to forge an agreement similar to that of Alibaba and Vodafone. A spokesperson from British Telecom has confirmed the progressing partnership through an email announcement.

Alibaba and Vodafone’s strategic partnership began in 2016 to provide Alibaba’s first data center in Europe. The data processing plant is placed in Frankfurt, Germany, to transfer and store computed data and provide a European base for Chinese companies and enterprises.

Synergy Research Group reported in June that Alibaba Cloud is the 4th largest cloud network provider globally and is just behind Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google.

Currently, Europe’s cloud computing network is led by Amazon Web Services, including that of British Telecom and Spain’s Telefonica. Alibaba Cloud’s partnership with British Telecom will expand its market in Europe in addition to challenge AWS’s prominent status in the continent.

Additionally, Alibaba and Alibaba Cloud has signed a memorandum with France’s top logistics company, Bollore, to work on transport and communication services in cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence.

“UK security agencies may scrutinize any partnership between Alibaba (SCMP)”, as the government of United States has strictly reinforced partnerships since Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment Corporation’s (ZTE) incident. This has perhaps delayed Alibaba’s plan to expand its market in North America, thus choosing to expand its European network beforehand.

Source: South China Morning Post, Inside News