Tencent said Thursday it added second availability zones in Bangkok, Frankfurt, and Tokyo as well as a third in Hong Kong. The new data centres would support increasing demand for and spend on cloud computing services, the Chinese tech vendor said.  Its senior vice president for cloud international Poshu Yeung noted that Tencent was aiming to boost its global data centre coverage by 30% this year.  With cloud demand growing, enterprise customers would want more diversity in service offerings as well as more robust redundancy and backup options, Yeung said.  Citing research from Frost & Sullivan, Tencent said 52% of organisations worldwide were estimated to be tapping cloud services last year, with 34% projected to also adopt cloud infrastructure in the next couple of years. Public cloud services also were expected to climb 23.1% this year to hit $332.3 billion, it said, pointing to Gartner stats.  According to Tencent, all four data centres were tier-3 facilities and located in “prime network hubs”, with connectivity to major local and international network operators.  The vendor in April opened its first data centre in Indonesia, with plans to open a second local site later this year, as well as a third availability zone in Singapore. In March, it unveiled plans to a new data centre in Bahrain by year-end, marking its first such facility in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  In an April 2021 interview with ZDNet, Yeung said the cloud market was one of few markets to see robust growth amidst the global pandemic last year, fuelled by accelerated digital transformation efforts. Tencent’s international cloud business in 2020 clocked triple-digit growth, he said, adding that this upward momentum was expected to continue this year.   Tencent operates more than 40 data centres in China alone, where its cloud business debut a decade ago. Its international business was launched some three years ago across various regions and currently operates more than 20 data centres outside its domestic market. 

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