Baidu to invest $1.6B in cloud-computing center

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Baidu Inc. said Monday that it would invest roughly 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in a cloud computing center.

Baidu didn’t give further details such as where the center would be located and how it was going to pay for the investment.

China’s leading search engine by revenue has been pushing hard to expand its hold of the rapidly growing mobile Internet market, and cloud computing–or remote online data storage–has been a key part of that initiative. The company has been offering remote storage to users and application developers to woo them to use its mobile services…

Earlier in the day at the Baidu Technology Innovation Forum in Beijing, the company introduced a new mobile web browser that offers Baidu services, speedy downloads, and applications that can run directly in the browser.

The cloud center and new browser are the most recent steps in Baidu’s gambit to gain a better foothold in the still young, but rapidly expanding, mobile Internet space.

Baidu has dominated online search in China since U.S.-based Google Inc. (GOOG) said it would stop working with Chinese censors and moved its search service to Hong Kong in 2010. But as China’s customers increasingly turn to smartphones to access the Internet, users have more often turned to other search engines as well as social networks to surf the web.

To counter the trend, Baidu launched an Android-based smartphone operating system in May and has been cooperating with handset makers to feature the software on an increasing number of phones sold in China.