Tencent Targets European Cloud Market

Tencent Cloud will provide cloud services in Europe through a strategic partnership with Traac.

The cloud business of Chinese technology giant Tencent announced the collaboration in a press release on Thursday (Jan. 12), saying that the deal will establish Traac as an authorized reseller of Tencent Cloud products and services in 19 European countries.

While Tencent may be better known for its business interests in social media, entertainment and financial technology, in recent years the holding company has expanded its presence in the market for cloud services.

And while it initially focused on penetrating the Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, since opening its first European data center in Frankfurt in 2021, the company has shown an interest in catering to the cloud needs of European customers.

“As demands for digital solutions and cloud technologies continue to see strong growth across Europe, Tencent Cloud will work closely with Traac together to help European customers speed up digital transformation and business growth,” Leo Li Shiwei, Tencent Cloud’s vice president for Europe, said in the release.

The agreement with Traac, a Swiss company, follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Swiss Finance and Technology Association (SFTA) announced by the organization’s president on LinkedIn last week.

While Tencent Cloud’s global infrastructure is still concentrated in the Asia Pacific region, the firm now operates 70 availability zones across 26 regions that include data centers in Europe, the U.S. and Brazil.

As well as the Central Europe region created by the Frankfurt data center, Tencent operates so-called “partner regions” by piggybacking off other providers’ physical infrastructure in London and Amsterdam.

In addition, it has over 1,000 cache nodes globally, excluding the 1,100-plus it operates in China. In the context of cloud computing, cache nodes are smaller hardware components that act as a local storage layer, enabling end-users to store a subset of data locally so that requests are served up faster than is possible by accessing the data’s primary storage location.

Outside of Europe, Tencent Cloud operates a number of cache nodes in the Middle East, helping to extend its cloud coverage to users in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Iraq.

In the UAE, Tencent is one of several international hyperscalers jostling for position in the country’s increasingly active market for cloud services. For example, in 2022, the UAE got its own Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud region and new Azure availability zones, while in November, Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian, disclosed that the Big Tech firm was considering opening a data center in the country.

For all PYMNTS EMEA coverage, subscribe to the daily EMEA Newsletter.