Alibaba Group Holding will work with Nvidia on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and announced plans to develop a big-data platform. The arm of China’s biggest e-commerce operator, known as AliCloud, will invest $1 billion in data analysis and machine learning, it said in a statement Wednesday. AliCloud hopes that demand for processing and storage from governments and companies will boost growth during the next decade as its tries to compete with Amazon.com in computing services.

Beyond basic cloud-computing services, AliCloud hsa also co-founded a quantum computing laboratory with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to help secure its data centers and develop machines capable of even faster calculations. The company will team up with Nvidia to provide customer support in the areas of deep-learning and high-performance computing, AliCloud said in a statement.

Microsoft and Google also are competing to rent the data storage and computing power that are the building blocks of Internet-based systems.