The global cloud computing market continues to be a bright spot for Tencent Cloud, where its international business presently covers Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and other major regions, according to China-based Internet giant Tencent.

To-date, Tencent Cloud has data center facilities in 26 geographic areas on five continents with 70 availability zones, as well as an exabyte-level storage capacity, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

In the first half of 2023, international business posted double digit revenue growth, with particularly strong performances in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Europe, and the Middle East. Tencent Cloud’s Global Partner Ecosystem – a key driving force for its international business – is now 11,000 partners strong, with partner-driven revenue growing 66 percent year-over-year as at mid-2023, the company added.

“As we enter our seventh successful year of operating in international markets, our expansion strategy is to support Chinese enterprises going overseas, while concurrently facilitating the entry of foreign businesses into China,” Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group (CSIG), said at the flagship Global Digital Ecosystem Summit. “This year, we also added more development teams in global markets spanning Latin America and the Middle East, to name just a few.”

Tencent Cloud’s International business expansion strategy revolves around the three pillars: Capability Enhancement and Product Internationalization, Enhancing Partners and Ecosystem, and Driving Innovation in Immersive Convergence. It provides solutions spanning industries such as internet, gaming, finance, tourism and hospitality, automotive, as well as retail.

With the launch of Hunyuan and a thriving international business, Tencent is committed to open collaboration in the ecosystem, with domestic businesses ultimately benefitting from the company’s high-quality model services, while international businesses leverage Tencent to access the Chinese market, in addition to undertaking their own digital transformations using Tencent products and services.

On a separate matter, Tencent has also debuted its proprietary foundation model, Hunyuan, at its flagship Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen on Thursday. It is now open to enterprises in China for testing and building apps via APIs on Tencent Cloud.

Enterprises in China may now access Hunyuan via Tencent’s public cloud platform and finetune it to their specific needs. The platform features strong Chinese language processing abilities, advanced logical reasoning, and comes with reliable task execution abilities.

Tencent’s foundation model supports a wide array of functions spanning the creation of images, copywriting, text recognition, and customer service, to name a few. These will be instrumental in key industries like finance, public services, social media, e-commerce, transportation, games, and many more, the company added.

This empowers enterprises to build powerful tools, in addition to training their own unique large models derived from Tencent’s Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering, which was first introduced in June this year. The MaaS provides enterprises with economically viable, industry-specific large models, featuring more than 50 solutions spanning 20 major industries, Tencent said. This creates a virtuous cycle in which enterprises refine their large models with Hunyuan to create uniquely intelligent services across their operations, it added.

Hunyuan has also been connected to 50 of Tencent’s own products, including Tencent Cloud, Tencent Advertising, Tencent Games, Tencent Fintech, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, Weixin Search, QQ Browser, and other core offerings.

Hunyuan will be extended to even more businesses and applications over time, according to Tencent.

Tencent Cloud ranks as the No. 1 cloud services provider in media services market, says Frost & Sullivan