Tencent Cloud will officially launch its Hong Kong data center by the end of this week, marking the start of the Chinese Internet giant's globalization strategy in the cloud computing sector.

Tencent Cloud's Hong Kong data center will reportedly focus on the Asia Pacific, Europe and American regions, providing comprehensive cloud computing services to those marketplaces. With Hong Kong's outstanding network hardware environment, Tencent Cloud's new data center will use an international BGP line, which is currently the fastest network line in the world. It has direct connections to America via a submarine cable, which will ensure the fast connections to Tencent Cloud's host.

Tencent Cloud's Hong Kong data center will adopt an advanced modular data center technology, effective green energy technology, and next-generation hardware technology. While carrying a large amount of applications, it can effectively reduce server costs. In addition, users will be able to choose customized products based on their actual needs.

Prior to this, Chinese Internet companies who wanted to expand into overseas markets needed to build local servers, which meant huge hardware investments and legal and recording formalities. With the help of Tencent Cloud's servers in Hong Kong, those companies will be able to rapidly and conveniently implement their overseas businesses.

While the rest of the world is making it easier for Chinese companies to setup server operations overseas, this still doesn't make it easier going the other way — foreign companies are still unable to setup Internet Service Provider facilities and gain an ISP license in China to directly control and run server farms or cloud computing services. For example, Amazon is beta testing its nascent Amazon Web Services cloud offering in China with its partner ChinaNetCenter. But Amazon can not directly own or run its servers in China, and its clients must also go through huge formalities to gain Internet Content Provider licenses prior to actually running any services with Amazon. Amazon must work with Chinese-owned ChinaNetCenter if it wants to do business in China.

Competitors like Aliyun and Tencent Cloud are currently not making great pains to require ICP licenses from their clients, so this puts Amazon at a huge sales disadvantage in their growth plans for China.

Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary, previously opened its cloud computing data center in Hong Kong in May 2014.