Eileen Yu| Zdnet
China’s two largest mobile operators have begun contruction work on two cloud computing facilities in Guizhou Province, located in the southwestern part of the country.
China Mobile and China Unicom said on Monday they were investing some 7 billion yuan (US$1.15 billion) into the two sites in Gui’an, where China Telecom–the country’s third-largest mobile operator–in October had already begun building its own cloud computing facility.
China Mobile would invest 2 billion yuan (US$327.27 million) in its facility which will span about 18.3 hectares of land, while China Unicom’s site would cover some 33.3 hectares from an investment of 5 billion yuan (US$818.18 million).
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 estimates by China Information Industry Net in April, the Chinese public cloud services market was worth 3.5 billion yuan (US$561.6 million) last year, and would hit 6.3 billion yuan (US$1.01 billion) by the end of 2013.
