When Alibaba Group Chief Executive Officer and Founder Jack Ma decided to hold the first Computing Conference, the cloud technology event drew 120 people. This year 60,000 attendees participated, and the partner list included major names in the industry, including as Intel, Nvidia, Cisco and SAP. What a difference eight years makes.

The public cloud services market continues to expand, with Gartner projecting 18 percent growth to $246 billion in 2017. And much of that growth is coming from China where established enterprise cloud service providers, or CSPs, such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and Baidu, continue to expand services.

“The scale of the country, the scale of the opportunity, is like nothing people have ever seen before. This is a market to be reckoned with,” said CJ Bruno (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of global accounts, Sales and Marketing Group, at Intel.

Bruno stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier, pictured, left) at The Computing Conference in Hangzhou, China. They discussed how Intel has been transforming from a PC-focused business to one that runs the cloud, as well as talked about the company’s expanding partnership with Alibaba. (* Disclosure below.)

Intel supplies China’s growing cloud market

Intel has been significantly diversifying its business over the past five years, with investments in a number of areas, including “internet of things,” drones and virtual reality. The company’s involvement in the China market is part of its global strategy to become the ultimate technology ingredient supplier as cloud drives compute, storage, networking and connectivity.

“We’ve identified the 60 to 70 next wave CSPs that are growing vibrantly around the globe, and there’s a long tail of another 120 that we’re interacting with,” Bruno said.

Intel has been working with Alibaba in a number of key areas in addition to cloud computing. The company has been partnering with the e-commerce giant in artificial intelligence development, big data analytics and system development plans.

For Alibaba and its ecosystem of partners, data management has become a critical challenge, and Intel has recognized this by moving its own technology closer to where the information resides.

“We’re moving the compute closer and closer to the data,” Bruno explained. “As we move that compute capability closer to where the data is sensed, you can analyze it quicker, you can make faster decisions, and you can implement those decisions at the edge.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of The Computing Conference. (* Disclosure: Coverage of the Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference is sponsored by Intel. All content is controlled by SiliconANGLE, and neither Intel nor Alibaba have editorial influence on the coverage.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE