Microsoft Corp plans to add four new data centers within China by early next year in a wider effort to expand its service capacity across Asia, said people familiar with its strategy, who asked not to be named as its details are not 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 center network with a greater presence around Beijing.
The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant already has six data centers in the country, operated by local partner 21Vianet, and now seeks to capitalize on a global surge in demand for Internet services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
The rapid growth is driven by Chinese businesses, slow to digitize in the past, now migrating to the cloud.
New regulations in China, including a sweeping set of data security edicts coming 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 expected to grow to US$46 billion in 2023, Microsoft has said.
Like Apple Inc, Microsoft is expanding data capabilities within China in concert with a local partner, anticipating a boom in data storage and management needs.
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