(Yicai Global) June 1 -- Baidu has completed the major structural work of the expansion to its CNY1.4 billion (USD197 million) Baidu Cloud Computing Center in Shanxi province, China, more than 20 days earlier than planned.

The Beijing-based firm can now begin brickwork, building the secondary structure and decorating at the hub, which is in Chief Executive Robin Li’s hometown Yangquan, local news outlet Yangquan Daily reported today. China Railway Construction Engineering Group build the 86,000 square meter facility, which includes four data centers and a factory building and will boost Baidu’s search, data, and intelligent driving businesses.

The firm has been putting increasing focus on its cloud services to diversify its revenue sources, with money from its primary business, online advertising, falling 13 percent to CNY22.5 billion (USD3.2 billion) in the first quarter, according to its latest financial report. Income from cloud services and smart devices rose 28 percent over the same period. 

When Baidu began building the Yangquan cloud center, it was the company’s first large-scale data center. It began selecting sites in 2011 and finished the first phase in 2018, spanning 120,000 meters and housing more than 150,000 servers with a storage capacity of over six exabytes (6 million terabytes).

Since then, it has built data centers in Beijing and Nanjing, Jiangsu province. In May 2019, it announced it would build a cloud computing center with over 100,000 servers at the Xi’an Space Base, which will be the company’s first major self-built data center in western China.

Editor: James Boynton