English

By Xie Fang

U.S. search engine giant Google is negotiating with several Chinese tech companies in a bid to launch its cloud service in China, the Securities Times reported Sunday night.

The company started searching for Chinese partners as early as the beginning of this year and finally selected the tech behemoth Tencent and the Chinese leading cloud service provider Inspur for further negotiation.

Google has been leasing out its cloud computing and storage capability and selling its intelligent office software suite named G Suite in many countries.

However, given the stringent Chinese laws which require all digital information to be stored in China, Google has to partner with Chinese companies to provide its cloud services in the Chinese market.

The news is seen as the company's latest move to return to the Chinese market after it withdrew from China in 2010. The company set up an artificial intelligence research center in Beijing this January and is now building a cloud data center in Hong Kong.

The collaboration with Chinese companies will also give Google an edge in its competition with other tech giants like Amazon which reached an agreement to sell its cloud business to a Beijing-based tech company late last year.

According to a report from the Synergy Research Group, a world-leading market data provider, China has become the world's second-largest cloud service market with domestic companies occupying the leading position. For now, Google ranks 4th by market share in the Asian could service market, falling behind Amazon, Alibaba and Microsoft.

Apart from the cooperation in providing cloud services, Google and Tencent have reached a patent sharing agreement this January under which the two companies would join forces to develop future technologies.