BEIJING, July 2 (Reuters) - Alibaba Cloud, the cloud

computing arm of Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group ( BABA ), announced the

opening of its third data center in Malaysia on Tuesday and

disclosed plans to launch a second data center in the

Philippines in October, according to a statement released on

Wednesday.

The expansion ensures that Alibaba Cloud can meet the rising

global demand for secure, resilient and scalable cloud services,

the company said.