Alibaba's Q3 cloud revenue up 84 percent from a year ago

Alibaba's cloud business exited its fiscal third quarter nearing a $4 billion annual revenue run rate.

The Chinese e-commerce giant said its cloud computing business saw revenue jump 84 percent in its December quarter to $962 million. Cloud computing is now 6 percent of Alibaba revenue, up from 4 percent in the third quarter a year ago.

Overall, Alibaba reported third quarter revenue of $17.05 billion, up 41 percent from a year ago, with net income of $4.5 billion.

Alibaba's e-commerce business drives the company, but the company has built a cloud business that rhymes with what Amazon has done with Amazon Web Services.

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According to Alibaba, cloud growth was driven by enterprise demand. Alibaba added 678 new cloud products and features related to analytics, artificial intelligence and security.

The company said that Alibaba Cloud will leverage the overall company's technologies for infrastructure, data management and services to broaden its services for enterprises.