Alibaba Group is reportedly investing $28 billion into its cloud platform over the next three years in an attempt to bolster support for services that have surged in light of the COVID-19 virus outbreak.

Published reports noted a statement from the China-based cloud giant as explaining that it would invest those funds into its semiconductor and operating system development as well as its data center infrastructure.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has posed additional stress on the overall economy across sectors, but it also steers us to put more focus on the digital economy,” Jeff Zhang, the president of Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence unit, said in a statement, adding that the investment will “help businesses speed up the recovery process, and offer cloud-based intelligent solutions to support their digital transformation in the post-pandemic world.”

Sid Nag, a VP at Gartner, explained that the investment showed Alibaba’s desire to maintain network integrity in light of that surge in usage. “That’s definitely a motivator for them,” he said. As an example, Nag said that Alibaba had recently made plans to secure approximately 10,000 new servers to help support increase use of its DingTalk video conferencing platform.

Alibaba reported that its cloud platform generated more than $1.5 billion in revenues during the final quarter of last year, which was a 62% increase compared to the previous year. This was also around 7% of Alibaba’s overall revenues for the quarter.

“We note while Alibaba has seen strong growth on cloud over the past year (60%-plus growth), this business represents less than 10% of overall revenues and we believe could double over the next few years as the China cloud story continues to ramp significantly,” Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote in an investor note, according to MarketWatch. “With Amazon and Microsoft in a global two horse race owning the cloud market, Alibaba is making both an offensive and defensive move with today’s cloud announcement in our opinion.”

Alibaba’s investment pledge comes on the heels of Google announcing that it would be slowing down its data center investments tied to COVID-19 related economic uncertainty. Google had previously said it would invest more than $10 billion this year into offices and data centers in the U.S.

A recent report from Synergy Research Group (SRG) ranked Alibaba as the largest cloud vendor in China at the end of 2019. It held a significant advantage over rivals Tencent and Baidu. However, its position outside of its home country was that of a challenger.

The same SRG report had Alibaba as the No. 2 vendor across the entire Asia-Pacific (APAC) region behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a more distant No. 4 across that region when subtracting its presence in China and Japan.

Outside of APAC, a recent report from Forrester Research placed Alibaba Cloud in the “contenders” category of its ranking of public cloud providers in North America. The vendor was noted for “an impressive innovation pace” but still struggled with its North American presence. “The vendor’s two regions in the U.S. aren’t enough of a footprint to attract large U.S. enterprises planning for large-scale migrations of infrastructure, though Alibaba remains a strong choice for U.S. companies expanding via cloud platforms into Asia,” the report stated.

Gartner’s Nag said that it was likely Alibaba was looking at its latest investment to target growth across Southeast Asia and India, “and I would not be surprised if Europe was also on their radar.”

“They are definitely wanting to put pressure on AWS and Azure, but they also want to make sure they are staying ahead of Google,” Nag said.