Tencent Holdings plans to open a third data center in Japan, where its cloud services for online games and livestreaming systems are enjoying robust demand.
Tencent’s Japanese business has been posting triple-digit annual growth, driven by cloud services for games, said Poshu Yeung, senior vice president for the company’s international cloud operations, in an interview with Nikkei.
“We are considering a third site for a data center,” he said from Hong Kong. “We have the experience, so this won’t take much time.”
The Chinese technology giant, which entered Japan’s cloud market in 2019, did not disclose its Japanese revenue or capital outlays for data centers.
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In Japan, Tencent will also launch a service Thursday to support metaverse creation with dozens of templates. This is an update to the support service the company began in January for cloud avatar creation and livestreaming—an offering that still required technical customization by customers.
“We’ll ease the burden on customers by offering an array of templates,” Yeung said.
Having branched out into overseas markets in 2016, Tencent now has a presence in more than ten countries and regions. Today it operates “30 data centers outside China with new additions in Brazil and Indonesia,” according to Yeung.
South Korea and Japan are similar markets in that demand is robust in the entertainment sector, such as for games.
“Tencent will tap its experience in the gaming sector to support game companies in Japan and South Korea in expanding their customer bases to Brazil and Southeast Asia,” Yeung said.
In the US and Europe, “orders are growing for cloud services designed to link businesses there with their offices in China,” he said.
US companies are not avoiding Chinese cloud services much amid trade frictions, according to Yeung.
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.