Ping An Technology vies for China’s cloud market leadership, taking on Alibaba and Tencent
- It aims to lead as service provider in finance, health care, smart city, real estate and automobile sectors, whose combined market is expected to hit US$5.8 billion in 2023
- Alibaba and Tencent control 50 per cent and 10 per cent of China’s public cloud market respectively
Ping An Technology, a subsidiary of China’s second-largest life insurer, is revving up infrastructure expansion to bolster its cloud computing service with the aim to become a market leader in the mainland in three to five years.
William Fang Guowei, chief technology officer of Ping An Tech, told the South China Morning Post that the company enjoyed a breakneck growth in cloud-service infrastructure last year, with demand for GPU (graphics processing unit) hardware volume jumping 12 times over 2016.
The technology unit of Ping An Insurance (Group) expected GPU volume would increase by 200 per cent on the year in 2018, with that amount to at least double next year on the company’s plan to become the front-runner in the Chinese cloud computing market.
To achieve such targets, “we need to better work with our vendors to support our growth,” Fang said. “We are also doubling efforts to adapt to the fast-changing situations.”
GPUs, efficient at manipulating computer graphics and image processing, are used in cloud service infrastructures.
Cloud computing allows individuals and companies to access services such as storage and analytics through the internet without needing their own data centres.
