U.S. technology provider IBM has teamed up with a unit of the Chinese property and entertainment giant Dalian Wanda Group to bring its cloud computing services to China, a Reuters report stated.
According to IBM, they will be offering key cloud platform and infrastructure as service technologies that Chinese firms can use. These will be provided through the newly launched venture, Wanda Cloud Company.
An IBM spokeswoman enthused that this partnership between them and the Wanda Internet Technology Group will be "responsible for distributing, building and operating the IBM cloud platform in China."
Nonetheless, the two firms did not further disclose neither the size of the deal nor the profit-sharing structure.
The agreement was inked by Wanda Group Chairman Wang Jianlin and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.
Through the partnership, IBM will also be bringing Watson, its business AI platform, to China for the first time. The company noted that more interactive services using the said platform will follow.
The IBM-Wanda deal is not the first time that the U.S. firm forayed into China's cloud computing sector. Two years ago, IBM has worked with Chinese tech firm 21Vianet to bring its services to the country's lucrative market.
Data from research firm Canalys predicts that the international market for cloud computing will hit around 560 billion yuan by 2020. Cloud computing refers to the storage of data on remote networks, instead of local servers.
For its part, Wanda has been eyeing to develop cloud computing, Internet finance and big data. In 2015, the conglomerate has poured in an investment worth 3 billion yuan to build a cloud-computing center in Chengdu.
Meanwhile, e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba has also announced its plans to launch four new data centers abroad as part of its efforts to grab a market share currently reigned over by Microsoft and Amazon.