SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Alibaba Group said its cloud unit aims to recruit 5,000 staff globally from now until the end of this financial year, in areas including network, database, servers, chips and artificial intelligence, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

“The digital transformation journey for businesses in China, which was previously expected to take three to five years, is now likely to be accelerated to be completed within one year,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

“To move forward in full speed, we are not only building trusted cloud technologies and services, but also investing in worldwide IT talents,” he said.

Alibaba’s financial year runs to March 31.