HANGZHOU - Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of China's internet giant Alibaba, had the third biggest market share in the global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market and the biggest in the Asia Pacific region for the third year in a row in 2019, according to a report released by global research and advisory firm Gartner.

Alibaba's market share in the global IaaS market climbed to 9.1 percent in 2019, up from 7.7 percent the year earlier. The Gartner report also showed that in the Asia Pacific region, Alibaba's market share increased to 28.2 percent last year, from 26.1 percent in 2018.

Alibaba Cloud announced last week that it would invest 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) in the research and development of core technologies such as cloud operating system, servers, chips and networks within three years.

Alibaba Cloud is the technology and public cloud platform underpinning Alibaba's ecosystem, which ranges from e-commerce and payment to logistics and supply chain management solutions.

In addition to Gartner's findings, an earlier report from market research and advisory firm International Data Corporation showed that Alibaba Cloud recorded the fastest year-on-year revenue growth compared with other global cloud service providers in the first half of last year.