TOKYO -- Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of China's internet giant Alibaba, on Thursday announced the launch of its third data center in Japan to cater to rising customer demand for digital transformation.

Located in Tokyo, the new data center looks to offer a wide range of cloud computing products and services including storage, network and elastic computing to Japanese customers.

"The launch underscores our continuous commitment to serving Japanese customers' digital transformation demands," said Unique Song, country manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence in Japan, at a press briefing in Tokyo.

Alibaba Cloud opened its first data center in Japan in 2016, followed by a second in 2019.

With the introduction of the new data center, Alibaba Cloud now has a network of 86 availability zones in 28 regions across the world, according to the company.

Alibaba Cloud ranked the third in the worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market with a share of 9.5 percent in 2021, following Amazon and Microsoft, according to a report by global research and advisory firm Gartner in June.