In a statement, Alibaba Cloud said the new hub, which opened in partnership with Teleperformance, will provide after-sales support to 88 countries in the three regions.

The director general of Alibaba Cloud's international technical service, Li Jin, said that the Porto centre "represents a further strengthening of the technical support capacity abroad" for the Chinese company.

The centre will help Alibaba Cloud “serve foreign markets more efficiently and smartly,” Li Jin added.

The Porto service centre is the first of three international centers that the company has decided to create. The other two, in Mexico City and the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, are expected to open later this year.

Alibaba Cloud stressed that the three cities are “local information technology hubs with rich talent pools, convenient for creating large service centres with multilingual capabilities”.

The president of the international unit of Alibaba Cloud, Yuan Qian, stressed that the new centres will help the Chinese company to better “understand and respect the data security rules of different countries”.

Alibaba Cloud is part of the Chinese technology group Alibaba.