Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s cloud computing arm AliCloud is doing very nicely in its bid to become the AWS of Asia, reporting stunning growth of 138 percent in 2016 that saw it pull in $468 million in revenues.

AliCloud said that it had more than 2.3 million customers as of March 31, 2016. Of those, it said that more than 500,000 were paying customers.

The amount of business AliCloud did last year doesn’t even compare to the likes of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, but the Chinese firm remains extremely ambitious. The company has been pursuing a policy of international cloud expansion over the last year, opening up new data center facilities in the U.S. and elsewhere, though for now it’s mostly targeting China-based companies that are looking to expand internationally. Indeed, last year Alibaba said it would invest $1 billion into AliCloud to further those expansion plans.

Alibaba appears to have made good on that promise, for not only has it opened new facilities but also announced key partnerships with U.S. firms like Intel and data center firm Equinix Inc. More recently, in January of this year, AliCloud forged a $1 billion partnership with chip and graphics purveyor NVIDIA Corp. aimed at bolstering its Big Data and deep learning systems.

In one of the boldest statements we’ve see in a while, Alibaba executive Joe Tsai proclaimed that AliCloud had now emerged as “one of the largest cloud computing businesses in the world”, even though its revenues amount to just three percent of Alibaba’s total revenues, and pale in comparison to those reported by AWS.

As for Alibaba itself, it did rather well too, posting a 33 percent year-on-year increase in revenues to $15.6 billion. The company, which makes the bulk of its revenues from retail, said it has 423 million annual active buyers as of March 31, 2016.

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