Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, is planning to set up a data center in Mumbai, India and in two other sites within the current fiscal year, the company has said.

With the recently announced data center in Malaysia, Alibaba Cloud will increase its computing resources in Asia, the company said.

According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India, the country’s data centre infrastructure market, currently valued at $2.2 billion, is expected to grow to $4.5 billion in size by 2018.

The Indian government has been pushing foreign companies to launch data centres in the country to make sure that sensitive data is stored within India. There has also been a spike in demand for cloud based services in the country. Microsoft was the first large cloud operator to launch its data centres in India. In 2015, it announced 3 new data centres in the country. Amazon launched its data centre in India in 2016 and Google has said it will launch an Indian data centre by 2017.

Also see: Late to the party, Google’s cloud leans on machine learning and AI to capture enterprise market

“Establishing data centers in India and Indonesia will further strengthen our position in the region and across the globe,” said Simon Hu, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud.

Including the three new centers, Alibaba Cloud will have 17 data centers across the world covering mainland China, Australia, Germany,Japan,Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

Alibaba Cloud has partnered with Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications and Tata Communications to launch its services.

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