Alibaba cloud biz is on a run rate over $4B

Alibaba announced its earnings today, and the Chinese e-commerce giant got a nice lift from its cloud business, which grew 66% to more than $1.1 billion, or a run rate surpassing $4 billion. It's not exactly on par with Amazon, which reported cloud revenue of $8.381 billion last quarter, more than double Alibaba's yearly run rate, but it's been a steady rise for the company, which really began taking the cloud seriously as a side business in 2015. At that time, Alibaba Cloud’s president Simon Hu boasted to Reuters that his company would overtake Amazon in four years.