(Telecompaper) Alibaba Group has opened its second data centre in Silicon Valley, in line with its USD 1 billion global push into the cloud computing business, Bloomberg reported. The centre will be aimed at customers on the US West Coast in the next three to five years, said Ethan Yu, who is leading the AliCloud unit's international expansion. Alibaba is planning its first data centre in Europe in the first half of 2016, Yu said. Alibaba believes internet-based computing and big data will boost growth in the next decade, tapping into demand for processing and storage from governments, finance and online gaming companies. Yu said that one strong competitor will be Amazon Web Services, with both Alibaba and Amazon addressing a fast-growing market. "As a competitor there are a lot of things we could learn from them, but there's also a lot of ways we can differentiate ourselves," he added.