AliCloud, the cloud computing arm of China’s Alibaba Group Holding Limited, has announced the opening of a second data center facility in Silicon Valley, and is inviting potential customers to sign up for its new services when it launches later today.

Alibaba has ambitious global expansion plans for AliCloud, having signed up with a number of prominent international partners to help it sell its services in countries across the world. AliCloud’s list of partners includes prestigious firms like Intel Corp., Equinix Inc., Mesosphere Inc. and the French cloud services provider Linkbynet.

This latest push by Alibaba comes after its CEO Daniel Zhang announced earlier this year that he was making globalization of its cloud services a number one priority. Later this year, Zhang also said Alibaba would invest $1 billion to build out its cloud computing operation.

Of course, it’s AliCloud’s push into the U.S. market that has caught the most attention as it puts it in direct competition with established giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine. The company made headlines when it opened its first Silicon Valley data center last March, though it hasn’t said if it’s building its own facilities or just leasing space.

Nonetheless, today’s announcement means AliCloud now has nine such facilities globally. That’s a big deal because having a distributed infrastructure is a key selling point of cloud companies – it makes it a much more attractive option for companies that sell their services globally. In addition, the distributed infrastructure gives customers more failover location options.

Interestingly, while AliCloud still trails AWS and Microsoft in the number of global data centers it operates, it’s believed to have more than Google does. While Google has a numerous data centers scattered across the globe, only a few of them host its cloud infrastructure services. With the opening of its new facility in South Carolina, Google operates out of four locations. AWS meanwhile, operates four public regions and one government cloud in the U.S., plus four more public regions in Asia and two in Europe. As for Microsoft, it has seven in the Americas, nine in Asia Pacific and two in Europe.

“Our data centers are typically located in key innovation and commerce hubs around the world, where we expect growing demand for cost-efficient cloud computing and big data analytics services,” said Ethan Sicheng Yu, Vice President of AliCloud. “Our second U.S. data center is situated in Silicon Valley which is the epicentre for technology innovation world-wide.”

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