The strategy of Alibaba is to take on the mighty Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the American IT market.

Alibaba’s cloud division has opened a second data center in Silicon Valley while Amazon has announced a slew of new features for its cloud service, as tech giants jostle for the top spot in a rapidly growing market.

The Chinese company said customers could apply from Monday for services from the data center, which will span over 10 cloud services including Elastic Compute Service, offering scalable computing services, an Analytic Database Service that provides real-time, high-concurrency online analytical processing, and a Cloud Monitor System using an open platform for the real-time monitoring of sites and servers.

AliCloud (also known as Aliyun, the Chinese version of its name) launched its first US data center in March, which also marked the start of its global expansion. The new facility is the company’s ninth centre globally and the fourth data centre announced in 2015, after its first United States data centre in March 2015, a Singapore data centre announced in August, and one in China in early September. The majority of the company’s other facilities are based in China, but there is expansion planned for Europe and the Middle East. In a letter published on Thursday as part of an elaborately packaged annual report created to ease the concerns of investors after a yearlong decline in Alibaba’s stock price, founder and executive chairman Jack Massachusetts said that the company’s cloud computing business is maintaining an annual growth rate of over 100 percent.

Meanwhile, AliCloud’s vice president, Ethan Sicheng Yu, acknowledged that Silicon Valley remains the “epicentre for technology innovation worldwide”.