China Mobile and China Unicom announced Monday they are investing some 7 billion yuan ($1.15 billion) on building two cloud computing parks in Guizhou province in the southwest part of the country.
The operators said they have begun construction work on the two sites in the Gui'an new area of Guizhou province, where China Telecom is already building its own cloud computing facility.
China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier by subscribers, will invest 2 billion yuan in its facility, which spans 275 mu (about 18.3 hectares). Unicom will spend 5 billion yuan on its site, which will cover 500 mu (about 33.3 hectares) of land.
Gui'an is one of five new areas singled out in the Chinese government's 12th five-year plan, covering 2011 to 2015, to drive development in the country's western regions.
According to statistics by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Chinese cloud services market is expected to grow by 25% to over 100 billion yuan in 2014, and create 10 million new jobs in 2015.
Big data spending meanwhile is expected to rise 30% to $14 billion next year and grow at a CAGR of 26% to hit $46 billion in 2018.
In a separate note, Unicom has unveiled WoCloud 2.0, the latest version of its cloud computing offerings that cover infrastructure, business-to-business and business-to-consumer.
The WoCloud V2.0, which is built with OpenStack technology, comprises of a full range of services, including cloud hosting (elastic cloud hosting, elastic load balancing), cloud storage (for both enterprise and public) and cloud applications.
Unicom has already delivered customized cloud services and cloud integration services to its first 50 customers, including Ericsson and Huafeng Meteorological Media Group.
At the same time Unicom also announced last week the debut of its WoCloud self-service portal - www.wocloud.cn - and the official opening of two data centers in Hohhot in Inner Mongolia and Langfang in Hubei province, of which internet players like Baidu and Alibaba are already customers.
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