Consumers play games powered by 5G technology in a shopping mall in Shanghai on Wednesday. The applications, which are supported by China Telecom, allow local residents to experience the high speed of the 5G network and games driven by cloud computing. Photo: IC

Tencent Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings, said on Monday that it launched the first internet data center (IDC) in Indonesia to meet growing demand for digitalization, further expanding its global footprint.

Located in Jakarta, the new IDC is now in full operation, completing the backbone access and networking of all major Indonesian and global internet services providers, and combining Tencent Cloud's own border gateway protocol to cover the entire country. The launch of the IDC in Indonesia enables businesses and organizations in the country to accelerate their digital transformation, the company said.

As Indonesia is one of the fastest growing public cloud markets in Asia Pacific with a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent and expected to increase its market size to $800 million by 2023, the new IDC in the country is positioned to fulfil the growing need for cloud services in Indonesia and in the region.

Poshu Yeung, senior vice president of Tencent Cloud International, said: "Given that Indonesian population structure is younger, it has a huge internet demographic dividend and its mobile internet market is quickly developing."

The IDC center in Indonesia is Tencent Cloud's latest addition to its growing infrastructure network that currently spans across 27 regions and 61 availability zones. Its overseas data centers have entered such countries as South Korea, Japan, India, Singapore, the US, Germany, Russia, Canada, and Thailand.

The company also announced its plan to launch a second IDC in the Indonesian market within one year.

Tencent Cloud has beefed up its global push over recent years amid rising overseas demand and fierce competition domestically.

Tencent Cloud had 15 percent of China's cloud market in 2020, trailing Alibaba Group with 40 percent and Huawei Cloud with 17 percent, according to research firm Canalys.

In March, Tencent Cloud signed a memorandum of understanding with Bahrain's Economic Development Board to launch an IDC in Bahrain by the end of 2021.

Within the global public cloud computing race, Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s market share in cloud infrastructure market amounted to 31 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020, still exceeding the combined market share of its two largest competitors, Microsoft and Google. Alibaba Cloud grew 54 percent in the quarter to account for 6 percent of the total market behind those foreign providers, data from Canalys showed.