Microsoft plans massive cloud capacity expansion in China
Microsoft plans to add four new data centres within China by early 2022 in a wider effort to expand its service capacity across Asia, according to people acquainted with its strategy who asked not to be named as its details aren't public.
Microsoft’s expansion in China is among the fastest for the company on the continent and in March it announced plans to expand its data centre network with a larger presence in the northern region around Beijing.
The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant already has six data centres in the united states, operated by local partner 21Vianet, and today seeks to capitalise on a worldwide surge popular for internet services through the pandemic.
The rapid growth is driven by Chinese businesses, slow to digitise in years past, now migrating to the cloud. New regulations, including a sweeping group of data security edicts getting into effect in September, are also prompting domestic and foreign enterprises to shift to local data management and boosting IT spending.
The cloud market in China is likely to grow to $46 billion in 2023, according to a government white paper cited by Microsoft.
Like Apple, Microsoft is expanding data capabilities within China in collaboration with an area partner, anticipating a boom in data storage and management needs. Nonetheless it will be going face to face with Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies, the two domestic leaders in providing cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft can depend on the maturity and ubiquity of its cloud services. Its Azure enterprise offering enables customers to host data and run applications in the cloud, while Office 365 gives internet-based versions of its familiar word processing, spreadsheet and collaboration programmes.
The company said its planned northern China expansion in 2022 would “effectively double” its intelligent cloud capacity in the united states in the coming years.
The Redmond firm’s commercial cloud sales in the quarter that ended March 31 rose 33 % to $17.7bn. For the reason that same period, the company reported $6bn in capital expenditures and forecast it'll lay out an even larger sum in the current quarter. It does not use cloud earnings by geography.
Source: www.thenationalnews.com
