In a further boost to data centre development in Inner Mongolia, the company that owns popular Chinese video-sharing app Kuaishou has announced plans to spend a cool $1.4 billion to build a data centre in Northern China.
The data centre, located in Unlanqab, Inner Mongolia, will house about 300,000 servers and aims to be online at the end of 2021.This will be the company's first large-scale data centre, according to business press reports.
This is the latest announcement relating to data centre development in Inner Mongolia, an area to which companies like Huawei, Alibaba, Apple, and UCloud have taken their business recently. And it’s not just because of cheap power and land or a recently granted fiscal stimulus package of some $506 billion to be used for 5G, tech and renewable power, welcome though these no doubt are. The area’s growing popularity as a digital hub in China also down to its cool weather.
Kuaishou was developed by Beijing Kuaishou Technology Co Ltd. It’s big in China, of course, but has made inroads into other markets, topping the Google Play and Apple App Store download charts in a number of countries.
According to Chinese news media, Kuaishou (known as Kwai) announced 300 million daily active users in February, putting it second only to Douyin (known outside China as TikTok), whose daily numbers exceeded 400 million in early 2020.
