Baidu to Spend $1.6 Billion on Cloud Center

Baidu, China’s biggest PC-based search engine, said Monday in Beijing that it’s going to put upwards of $1.6 billion in a new cloud computing center. It declined to give details but the sum it says it’s willing to spend is a powerful lot of money in any currency. One report suggests the center will be online in four years and have upwards of three million CPU cores and 4,000PB of storage. It could take Baidu four years to figure out how to pay for such a thing. Obviously it wants a gateway for mobile services such as the online storage it’s already offering. It released free tools on Monday to encourage developers to build apps using its cloud services.

read more