Alibaba Cloud today announced it is aiming to recruit 5,000 technology talents worldwide from now until the end of the financial year, in areas including network, database, servers, chips and artificial intelligence. This commitment for job creation follows the announcement in April that the cloud computing giant would invest additional RMB200 billion (US$28 billion) in the next three years to build the next-generation datacenters.

“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.” said Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “In light of the fast-growing demand of digital shift from global clients in all sectors, we are continuing with our commitment to offering world-class cloud services. To move forward in full speed, we are not only building trusted cloud technologies and services, but also investing in worldwide IT talents who are pioneering the development of cutting-edge cloud and data intelligence technologies.”

Alibaba has been committed to talent development and frontier research for long. In 2017, Alibaba established Alibaba DAMO Academy, which gathers global talents for fundamental technology research in areas such as machine intelligence, vision computing, natural language processing, human-machine interactions, IoT and financial technology.

Pioneering technologies from Alibaba DAMO Academy, including speech AI, image search, and CT image analytics, have been introduced to Alibaba Cloud’s clients worldwide over the past years. More advanced technologies are expected to meet the fast-growing demand of digital shift from clients especially businesses from APAC, where Alibaba Cloud is ranked the No. 1 public cloud service provider.