Alibaba in talks with BT

Alibaba Group Holding is in talks with the UK-based BT Group, the IT consulting unit of Britain’s former phone monopoly, about a cloud services partnership, Bloomberg reported Monday.

A BT spokeswoman confirmed by email that the British telecoms company is in talks with Alibaba Cloud, New York-listed Alibaba’s cloud computing arm, but declined to give details, said the report.

Alibaba Cloud is now the fourth biggest global provider of cloud infrastructure and related services, behind Amazon, Microsoft Corp and Google, according to media report.