Founding of Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun)

Alibaba Group's then-CTO, Dr. Wang Jian, spearheads the creation of Aliyun, a new subsidiary dedicated to building a public cloud computing platform from scratch, driven by the massive internal needs of Alibaba's e-commerce ecosystem.

Significance

This marked Alibaba's strategic pivot into cloud computing, recognizing it as the future of infrastructure and a critical component for its own hyper-growth, setting the stage for services like OSS.