Alibaba Shutting Down Data Centres in Australia, India as Sovereignty Issue Sharpens

Alibaba will cease operations at its data centres in Australia and India, with the Chinese e-commerce titan’s cloud arm saying it plans to shift investment to facilities in Southeast Asia and Mexico.

The data centre locations in Mumbai will shut down on 15 July and the Sydney facilities will close on 30 September, Alibaba Cloud said late last week. The announcement followed multiple rounds of notifications and migration plans sent to affected customers since December 2023, according to Alibaba.

“We recommend you to migrate your business to Alibaba Cloud region in Singapore or other regions at your earliest opportunity,” the company said.

The cloud division gave no reason for the shutdowns, but the news comes amid heightened concerns about data sovereignty as more governments take the view that a country’s digital infrastructure should be managed domestically.

Keppel DC REIT’s Oz Exit

The manager of Singapore-listed Keppel DC REIT disclosed in April that it would sell a pair of Sydney data centre buildings and their underlying site to a unit of Australia’s Macquarie Technology Group for A$174 million ($112 million).

The transaction involving the Intellicentre Campus in Macquarie Park “delivers on the expectations of our customer base, which values our Australian ownership, data security and sovereign credentials”, Macquarie Technology Group CEO David Tudehope said at the time.

That same month, multiple sources confirmed to Mingtiandi that hyperscale provider Vantage Data Centers was shopping its four Hong Kong assets less than three years after acquiring them from local telecom operator PCCW. Hong Kong in March had passed a new national security law banning unlawful acquisition, possession or disclosure of information deemed to be state secrets.

Then in June, the Australian Financial Review reported that Japanese IT giant Fujitsu was seeking to auction off its six data centres across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia in an exercise dubbed Project Emerald.

Southeast Asian Opportunities

Making good on its intentions to expand in Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud announced last month that it would build its first data centre in the Philippines as part of a $1 billion plan to grow its presence in the subregion.

The Manila facility would make the country the fourth in Southeast Asia with an Alibaba Cloud data centre, following Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Google Cloud, meanwhile, is treading gently into Thailand’s data centre space with plans for a “sovereign cloud offering”, Data Center Dynamics reported in June.

The US tech colossus has teamed with a unit of Bangkok-based Gulf Energy Development on a project that promises to let clients meet data residency, security and privacy requirements in Thailand and provide access to the AI and analytics capabilities of Google.

Gulf Edge will operate a Google Distributed Cloud as a managed GDC provider, offering deployment options for GDC as either an air-gapped on-premises solution or from within a Gulf group data centre, according to the report.