Singaporean technology company Sea Ltd. has launched a new cloud-focused business unit dubbed Sea Cloud.

As reported by w.media, the plans were revealed by Sea's founder and CEO Forrest Li in an email to staff, which has since been made public in an SEC filing.

In the email, Li wrote: "For more than ten years, we have quietly built and run our own cloud platform. It was never a side project. It is the backbone powering Garena, Shopee, and Monee’s scale every single day, at a level of cost and reliability we could not have bought from anyone else.

"Over the last two years, around 500 Sailors have been rebuilding that platform to power something new: the wave of AI applications rising across every part of Sea. Because of their work, taking an AI idea from a whiteboard to production inside our company is now dramatically faster than it was two years ago. We are now going to offer that capability to the world. Its name is Sea Cloud."

Garena, Shopee, and Monee are Sea's digital entertainment, e-commerce, and digital financial services offerings, respectively. Monee could also soon go public separately.

Sea first went public on October 20, 2017. According to Li, since then, the company's quarterly active users have grown almost ten times, from 69 million to 666 million. He added: "Shopee’s quarterly GMV has grown 35 times, from $1.1 billion to $38.3 billion. And our quarterly revenue has grown more than 80 times, from $94 million to $7.8 billion."

Following the publication of the SEC filing, Sea Ltd.'s stock dropped from $88.67 to $82.06. It is currently sitting at around $77.81 at the time of writing.

Sea Ltd.'s most recent annual report notes that the "servers we currently use are hosted in leased data centers in different areas across our markets, as well as on cloud services. The data centers in our network are owned and maintained for us by major domestic and international data center providers. We generally enter into leasing and hosting service agreements with renewal terms."

While details including data center providers and specific locations are not provided, the company states: "Our network infrastructure utilizes our private data centers and cloud services that are linked with high-speed networks. We have established local servers and infrastructure in many of our key markets to ensure faster connections and a seamless user experience.

"We operate at a scale that routinely delivers massive amounts of content to tens of millions of users across our platforms. Our technology architecture has been designed to scale to accommodate the large amounts of data our network generates. As our user base grows and the level of engagement and activities on our platforms increase, we will continue to expand our technology infrastructure to maintain and improve the quality of our user experience."