Alibaba, SoftBank in cloud computing JV in Japan

Alibaba announced a joint venture with Japanese telecom operator SoftBank to offer cloud computing services in Japan on Friday.

The joint venture, called SB Cloud, will be 60 percent owned by SoftBank and 40 percent owned by Alibaba. SoftBank's parent company, SoftBank Group Corp., is Alibaba's biggest shareholder.

SB Cloud, will use Alibaba's own cloud computing business and rely on SoftBank for sales and marketing to compete with cloud services offered by Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure in Japan.

SB Cloud will open a data center in Japan and offer Alibaba Cloud-powered services to clients ranging from small start-ups to large multinational companies, Alibaba said in a press release.

Alibaba has data centers in the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Revenue from Alibaba's cloud computing services rose 175 percent during the first three months this year to 1.06 billion yuan (162 million U.S. dollars).