Alibaba to hire 5,000 workers as pandemic drives demand for cloud services
“The digital transformation journey for businesses in China, which was previously expected to take three to five years, is now likely to be accelerated to be completed within one year.” Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said in a statement.
The jobs announcement comes after Alibaba committed in April to spend 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) over the next three years to build more data centers. Cloud revenue at the tech giant grew to 40 billion yuan ($5.7 billion) in fiscal year 2020, an increase of 62% over the previous year.
Unemployment has surged during the pandemic. But there are still companies hiring amid the economic calamity as changing consumer habits compel firms in a wide variety of industries to stock up on talent.
Microsoft has hundreds of open positions related to its Azure cloud service, according to advertisements on LinkedIn, the social media platform it acquired in 2016, while Amazon lists thousands of cloud jobs on its own website. US software firm VMware has 1,350 job openings across the world, many of which are in cloud services -— a hiring priority for the company.
Demand for cloud services is surging globally as more people work and attend classes at home during the coronavirus pandemic. Some universities are preparing to present lectures online into next year, and many are looking for suppliers to manage their data backups.
Google Meet, the company’s video-communication service, has seen a 30-fold increase in usage since January, adding around 3 million new users and servicing 3 billion video calls daily.