Tencent to build biggest data center in northern China

Tencent, China’s second-biggest Internet company by market value, has signed a contract on Wednesday with a local government in Zhangjiakou, a city in northern China’s Hebei province to invest 300 billion yuan ($44 billion) in building a North China Information Technology Base locally, reported the Shanghai Securities News.

In recent years, with the rapid growth of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence, the significance of data center as the core infrastructure of IT industry has been growing. Several top Internet companies including Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google have all proposed concrete plans to set up data centers targeting Chinese markets.

Against the backdrop, Chinese mainland-based companies including Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have already initiated their separate infrastructure projects, in a bid to process business data boasting exponential growth.

Based on the signed agreement, Tencent is to build three data bases in the Huailai county of Zhangjiakou, which covers 350 mu each. It’s designed by 2022 when the whole project is finished; one million servers would be put into use in the center.

According to Chinese media reports, Tencent already owns the largest number of servers in China.

“In the future, every industries would require to process their data through cloud computing and AI technology,” Pony Ma, Tencent’s CEO and founder was quoted as saying previously. It’s reported that the data center would further boost Tencent’s capabilities in big data and cloud computing.