jack maREUTERS/Lucy NicholsonJack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is upping its investment in cloud computing, with a new, $1 billion cash infusion, making it more of a competitor to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft than ever before. 

The funding will be used to expand Aliyun's international presence, extend its alliance-based ecosystem, and to build new products that it can offer at lower costs, the company announced in a press release. 
This is the second of recent signs that Alibaba's getting serious about its cloud business. Just last month, Aliyun signed a series of new partnerships with the likes of Intel and data center company Equinix to localize its cloud offerings without having to build its own new data centers.
Right now, cloud computing only constitutes a small chunk of Alibaba's $2.8 billion in revenue last quarter, but this new investment prove Aliyun doesn't plan to slow down. 
Right now, Amazon leads cloud computing in the US, on track to book more than $7 billion this year from its Amazon Web Services infrastructure business — that's than its four closest competitors (Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, and Google) combined.