Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary Aliyun has formally opened its Beijing data center.

Along with Hangzhou and Qingdao, this Beijing outpost is Aliyun's third data center focused on global services. The company is reportedly now selecting overseas sites for similar operations, which indicates that the company is accelerating its expansion. In addition, the company's South China engine room is expected to open in the second half of 2014.

Aliyun's Beijing cloud computing data center has 10,000 servers for the first phase and it mainly serves clients in the Beijing and the North China region. Its major customers include government research institutions, financial organizations, and start-up companies.

The Beijing cloud computing data center will provide four types of cloud products: cloud servers, relational database services, open storage services, and load balancing services. Users can subscribe to those services on the official website of Aliyun. More products will be available in the future.

The opening of the Beijing cloud computing data center will offer more network node options to users so as to further improve user application service reliability and response speed.