HTC stepped up its Virtual Reality (VR) push after announcing a strategic partnership with Chinese giant Alibaba’s cloud unit to “explore high scalable and price competitive VR solutions”.

In a statement, the companies said the partnership is intended to advance VR with cloud computing, with a focus on developing solutions to tackle bandwidth allocation and data processing needs in areas such as VR video production and VR broadcasting.

The move also builds on an announcement by HTC last week, where it revealed plans to launch Viveport, a so-called app store for VR allowing people to engage with other users of the HTC Vive VR headset and other VR customers.

The platform features numerous categories with a wide range of VR experiences, on which users can interact.

The partnership with Alibaba will help bring together industry developers to build a VR cloud ecosystem, said the companies, and extend Viveport to connect Alibaba Cloud’s cloud computing platform.

HTC’s China regional president of Vive HTC, Alvin Graylin, who in June announced a new VR consortium pulling together 28 of the world’s largest VC firms with $10 billion of investible capital, said the partnership with Alibaba Cloud “will be a landmark collaboration between the VR and cloud computing industries”.

“By utilising the cloud computing expertise and enabling the 500k developer community built on Alibaba Cloud, HTC Vive will be able to provide more reliable resources to VR content developers, while delivering smoother access and rich content to VR customers on our Viveport content store in China,” he said.