The Alibaba Group has announced the set-up of the Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook – a cutting-edge research and development centre – into which they will be injecting an equivalent of S$20.6 billion within the next three years for the research of new technology. The first stage of the plan includes the setting up of seven advanced technology labs, one of which is situated in Singapore. The Alibaba team revealed that in August 2017, they had undertaken studies on institutions such as SMU, A*Star and other local institutions and found that Singapore possesses competitive advantages in the areas of cloud computing, data analytics and cloud hosting, and would be furthering collaboration with Singapore’s institutes of higher learning.