The data centre - jointly built by Apple and Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry Company - in Gui'an New Area, began operations earlier this week, according to the new area's administrative committee.
In 2017, Apple signed an agreement with the Guizhou provincial government to build the facility, with a contracted investment of $1 billion. The data centre plans to offer iCloud services to Chinese mainland customers.
“The data centre is expected to further improve Chinese users' experience in terms of access speed and service reliability, as well as improve the overall reliability of Apple's products and services on the Chinese mainland,” reports Xinhua.
Guizhou benefits from climate, power supply and network infrastructure advantages when it comes to the building of new data centres. The likes of Huawei, Tencent and Alibaba have facilities in the region.
Apple is developing another Chinese data centre in the Inner Mongolia region of the country's north.
In Europe, Apple axed plans to build a second $921 million data centre in Denmark a couple of years back, after buying the land for it in 2017. That decision came after it was unable to go ahead with a €850 million facility in Ireland after failing to get it through planning.
