Dive Brief:

• China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. announced it will invest $1 billion into its Aliyun cloud computing arm to challenge Amazon's Web Services division.

• Alibaba said the investment will help it set up new Aliyun data centers in Japan, Europe, Singapore and the Middle East.

• Analysts estimate the global cloud computing market is worth about $20 billion.

Dive Insight:

Aliyun's expansion aims to challenge U.S. cloud players like AWS, Microsoft and IBM.

"Our goal is to overtake Amazon in four years, whether that's in customers, technology, or worldwide scale," said Simon Hu, the president of Aliyun. "Amazon, Microsoft and others have already laid the groundwork for us by educating the markets about cloud in the U.S. and Europe, so we have an even better opportunity to join in the competition."

Amazon currently controls 29% of the U.S. cloud infrastructure provider market.