GDS has recently entered into a strategic cooperation with ICBC Tech Co. Ltd. The two parties will leverage their respective strengths based on existing solid cooperation and mutual trust to further strengthen their comprehensive cooperation in cloud service, data center hosting, operations services and information security. The goal is to tap the full development potential of the data center market and drive the New Infrastructure Construction initiative. 

Through New Infrastructure Construction, GDS will leverage its data centers together with 20 years of experience in professional data center hosting and operations services, to help ICBC Tech further optimize and develop the underlying IT infrastructure of financial ecological clouds and expand its financial ecological SaaS business.

In return, GDS will take advantage of ICBC Tech’s professional capabilities in development of financial business application systems and financial-level information security systems to provide customers with more comprehensive information security systems, value-added cyberattack prevention services, data center hosting, operations services and cloud-network convergence solutions. This will further enrich GDS’s data center IT value chain and support its efforts to strengthen its regional presence, while helping ICBC Tech to expand its influence in the information security area. 

Since 2017, ICBC and GDS have been engaged in successful project loan cooperation on a number of data center projects in the Yangtze Delta region. And in June this year, the ICBC Shanghai and Suzhou branches provided GDS with a RMB 6 billion line of credit to help GDS invest in New Infrastructure Construction and inject new momentum into the integrated high-quality growth of the Yangtze Delta region.

“Data centers are an important part of computing infrastructure in the New Infrastructure Construction initiative,” says William Huang, Chairman and CEO of GDS. “They support the smart transformation and upgrading of all industries, including finance. Building on a solid foundation of cooperation with ICBC, GDS will use the partnership with ICBC Tech to leverage its experience accumulated over the years in the areas of data center cluster development, data center hosting and management cloud services. We will help ICBC Tech to enrich its end-to-end solutions for finance and government sectors and constantly improve its industry solution competitiveness, while strengthening the two parties’ exchanges and complementarity in data center operation and disaster backup. Together we will create a more powerful synergy and jointly explore and grasp all of the new opportunities presented by our age.”

About ICBC Tech Co., Ltd.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ICBC Tech Co. Ltd. was incorporated on May 8, 2019 with a registered capital of RMB 600 million. Headquartered in Xiongan New Area, Hebei with office premises in both Beijing and Xiongan, the company’s operating philosophy is “serve society, co-build ecosystems, lead innovation, rally talent”. Internally the goal is to enable ICBC’s smart banking strategy and become an incubator and booster leading FinTech innovation; externally the goal is to enable industry customer business innovation to become a new momentum and new paradigm for development of a “finance + industry” ecosystem. With a business scope designed to provide ICBC’s major customers with IT system R&D, financial business systems output, FinTech product and service output, and financial ecological SaaS cloud services, ICBC Tech currently offers three product lines - “Finance + Industry”, “Finance + Technology”, and “New Financial Ecosystem”.

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