August 24, 2018

Tencent to invest USD 438 million in North China data center facility

The data center seeks to provide services to enterprises that leverage cloud, IoT, big data and AI to accelerate their workloads.

server farm

Cloud giant Tencent have signed a contract with the Huailai County of Zhangjiakou City, North China to invest USD 438 million in a new data center hub. As per the terms of the deal, Tencent will be offering data center services to cloud-native businesses leveraging AI (Artificial Intelligence), IoT (Internet of Things) and big data to boost their mission-critical workloads.

According to Tencent, AWS, Microsoft, Google and other cloud players have shown great interest in the Chinese market and the race to gain cloud market share has intensified. They claim that with the growing demand for cloud-based products across the APAC (Asia Pacific) region, enterprises will need more storage space to host business applications at data centers.

Tencent claim that enterprises in China have evolved when it comes to IT architectures and are making amends to their networks to accommodate IoT, AI and big data processes. They also believe that government support, ample space of area and state-of-the-art technology can do justice to the investment they are making at this data center facility.

The cloud giant says that they have agreed to acquire a total of approx. 700,000 sq. meter of space to build the facility in North China. They say that the facility will finish completion by 2022 and will have almost one million servers.

Speaking about the move, Zhu Qunde, Deputy Secretary of the Huailai County Party Committee and Executive Deputy Director of the Shacheng Economic Development Zone, commented:

The government has land resources and Huailai has sufficient power as a whole, but there are not enough substations to meet the needs of the new generation of information technology industry, 110 KV, or even 220 KV, and high-level backbone network exports. It is totally dependent on limited government resources.