IBM announced in January that it would build Asia's largest cloud storage center in China through a partnership with local entities, eWeek.com reported.

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The US company joined with Range Technology Development Co Ltd and the Hebei provincial bureau of industry and information to build the 620,000-square-meter center in Langfang, Hebei province.

It is expected to be the largest cloud storage industry base in Asia when completed in 2016. IBM has set up a network of 10 such centers on six continents, eWeek.com said.

The market for China's data center services reached $667.1 million in 2009 and is forecast to grow an additional $1.9 billion over the next five years, IBM said in its press release, quoting International Data Corp.

Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored on multiple virtual servers, generally hosted by third parties, rather than being hosted on dedicated servers, according to Wikipedia.