Huawei to Pump $1B into Cloud Services Business

Chinese IT giant Huawei announced plans to invest $1 billion to grow its cloud services business, according to reports.

It is one of several major Chinese technology companies to announce a big investment program to expand cloud services. Tencent said in February it would spend $1.57 billion to grow its cloud business, and Alibaba announced a $1 billion cloud investment in July.

Such investment programs usually mean additional services but also expansion of data center infrastructure in both capacity and geographic reach to deliver cloud services to more customers.

One place where Chinese giants’ cloud ambitions have been felt is Silicon Valley, where data center providers have seen increased demand for capacity these giants generate. Alibaba’s cloud services arm Aliyun launched its first Silicon Valley data center earlier this year and announced plans to launch a second one just this month.

Tencent and Baidu have also been shopping for data center space in the region. Wholesale and retail data center provider CoreSite announced in July that it leased data center capacity in Silicon Valley to China Telecom, which would in turn provide that capacity to an unnamed tech company from China.

In June, Chinese data center provider 21Vianet – whose data centers in China support cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Office 365 and, more recently, IBM SoftLayer – took data center space in Santa Clara, California, with Server Farm Realty to serve Chinese customers.

Huawei said Monday it will spend the $1 billion over five years to make its cloud services more attractive to developers, Reuters reported.