The director of Chongqing Municipal Commission for Industries and Information, Mu Huaping, said that the city aims to become one of the world’s most important data processing centres with the help of cloud computing. This refers to the on-demand provision of computational resources via a computer network, rather than from a local computer.

On 24 May, Pacific Telecom became the first company to settle in Liangjiang Cloud Computing Park. The company is to invest US$150m to build one offshore and one onshore data processing centre with a total of 3m servers. Operations are expected to start by end of 2012. The company has also promised to connect Chongqing with international ocean cables.

Pacific Telecom has similar cloud computing centres in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Tianjin.

China Mobile has already agreed to participate in Chongqing’s cloud computing sector by building a new cable and offshore data processing data.