The cloud computing wars have entered a new phase with the news that Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group is to open its first data center in Silicon Valley, where it will go head-to-head with home grown cloud giants Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft.

Alibaba, which held the largest IPO in history last year at $25 billion, is muscling in to U.S. territory via its subsidiary Aliyun division. Its the company’s first data center to be located outside of China, where it has four facilities on the mainland and one in Hong Kong, and where it claims over 1.4 million cloud customers. The company refused to say exactly where its new facility is located due to security reasons, but did reveal plans to build open more overseas data centers later this year, in Europe and Southeast Asia.

Aliyun will be up against it in the U.S., where AWS, Google and Microsoft triumvirate has long held sway as the most dominant vendors, but the company does offer services to match. These include a data processing and storage cloud, plus virtual serve and load-balancing services for companies running large websites. It also touts a data security service called YunDUN that’s designed to thwart DDoS Attacks, and is planning to offer large-scale data storage in the near future.

For now, the company is refusing to divulge the costs of said services, although it did say that its prices would be “cost competitive”. The initial plan is to target Chinese businesses that are based in the U.S. as a way of “testing the water”, said Sicheng Yu, Aliyun VP and head of international, in a statement. That makes sense because Aliyun is already familiar with serving Chinese enterprises, but it doesn’t plan to stop there – foreign conquest is on the agenda too.

“We know well what Chinese clients need, and now it’s time for us to learn what U.S. clients need,” added Sicheng.

TechCrunch speculates that Aliyun may well be tempted to target U.S. firms that are already operating in China. It’s an obvious move, because Aliyun may already be on the radar of such companies. After all, AWS just offers a limited beta service in China at present, one which is dwarfed by the size and scale of Aliyun’s.

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