You Thought Amazon's Cloud Was Big? Alibaba's Is Huge

After keeping the world waiting for nine years, Amazon finally broke out earnings for its Amazon Web Services on Thursday. The $1.57 billion in sales for the quarter suggest that the company is far ahead of rivals in the cloud computing business. But as AWS expands globally, it faces strong competition from a familiar foe: Alibaba.

Amazon already has 28 percent of the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services, followed by Microsoft with 10 percent, according to a report by Synergy Research Group. To expand its share, Amazon has spent the past few years plunking down gigantic data centers around the globe to help it quickly serve customers outside the U.S. In some cases, it did so to abide by local regulations as to where these servers should be located. Unlike many of its rivals, Amazon has targeted China, opening a data center near Beijing in 2014.