Alibaba slows down US expansion

According to a new article from the Information, Alibaba, has slammed on the brakes for its US expansion plans. It was pretty recently (2015) that the CEO of Alibaba (Daniel Zhang) had outlined some ambitious plans:

The cloud business will be a very important sector for Alibaba. We hope to match or even surpass Amazon in 3 to 4 years.

Apparently they have run into headwinds and now plan to focus on “the narrower market of U.S. multinational companies that need cloud services in China”. Among the reasons are AWS’ lobbying power in DC given the trade climate and its inability to find the right sales personnel. It’s data centers in the US are running below capacity. But, it’s not all bleak: Alibaba Cloud overtook IBM to become the world’s fourth-largest public cloud provider during the first quarter of 2018.