Chinese tech company Xunlei has planned to launch cloud computing services in the U.S to compete against AWS in a bid to expand their global footprint. Xunlei’s expansion plan also includes Europe where they intend to swing into action by early 2018.
This move has come into force months after Xunlei announced OneCloud, a low-cost photo and video storage platform along with other functions for their customers. They also added that cloud computing is picking up quickly in China but the government rules and regulations do not allow significant access to foreign players.
Xunlei says that they have adopted the model of customer bandwidth usage to their competitive advantage. Laying emphasis on the benefit they will provide, Lei Chen, CEO at Xunlei said:
The model of using customers’ bandwidth will bring us the capacity to provide cloud computing at a very low cost, perhaps one-third of the cost of Amazon.
He further stated that Xunlei is in the midst of building a technology that aims to increase security by analyzing user’s data away from the central location. Explaining this in detail, Chen said:
We will use artificial intelligence to process users’ own data to help us to service them better, but we don’t want to know what artificial intelligence understands about our users.
Industry watchers say that Xunlei’s move is aligned with the trend of Asian companies entering in the U.S for a larger market share. It will be interesting to watch how AWS react to this given the number of activities they are doing with respect to product launch and acquisitions.