Alibaba Group plans to hire 5,000 people for its Alibaba Cloud operations, one of the ecommerce giant’s fastest growing business units, during the next 10 months. The workforce expansion comes less than two months after the company announced plans to invest $28 billion in its cloud platform during the next three years.

Alibaba said it will make the hires before the end of its financial calendar year, which ends on March 31, 2021. The company is recruiting IT professionals with expertise in networking, database management, servers, chips, and artificial intelligence (AI). The financial and employee efforts are buoyed by a surge in cloud computing demand that has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The digital transformation journey for businesses in China, which was previously expected to take three to five years, is now likely to be accelerated and completed within a year,” Jeff Zhang, president at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said in a statement. “We are not only building trusted cloud technologies and services, but also investing in worldwide IT talent who are pioneering the development of cutting-edge cloud and data intelligence technologies.”

Alibaba’s increased investments in cloud computing contrast with Google, which recently announced plans to reduce spending on data centers through the remainder of 2020. Google didn’t break out numbers specific to Google Cloud, but the company hired 20,000 people last year and previously planned to add a similar number this year prior to the coronavirus outbreak.

Alibaba reported a 62% year-over-year increase in cloud revenues during the final quarter of 2019, generating more than $1.5 billion in revenue and roughly 7% of its total earnings during the quarter. The company was the largest cloud vendor in China at the end of 2019, and it outpaced overall market growth and gained global market share during the first quarter of 2020, according to Synergy Research Group.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure continue to dominate the global cloud market, combining for more than half of all cloud revenues earned during Q1. Alibaba closed the quarter with a 5% market share, according to Synergy Research Group. Alibaba and IBM are effectively tied as the next largest cloud providers behind the big three — AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.