Amazon Web Services announces upcoming China region for its cloud computing platform

Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, today announced the upcoming limited preview of its China Region for the AWS cloud computing platform. This will be the fourth AWS Region in Asia Pacific and the tenth Region globally. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select group of China-based and multinational companies with customers in China will be invited to begin using AWS Cloud services in the AWS China Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud.

Another step ahead for Amazon in its bid to become the world’s biggest cloud computing platform for businesses, and to specifically take aim at a big regional competitor in Asia, Alibaba: today it announced that it would extend its Amazon Web Services suite of products to China beginning with a limited preview in early 2014. You can apply for early access on the AWS China homepage here. It is teaming up with local players to provide infrastructure to underpin AWS, and is also starting an incubator to develop more localized services to run in the AWS cloud.