Chinese Internet giant Tencent is expanding its presence outside of its homeland, opening a data center in Silicon Valley and revealing plans for four more across the world.

Tencent Cloud already operates more than a dozen data centers in mainland China, as well as facilities in Hong Kong, Singapore and Toronto. 

Five in a year

The Silicon Valley data center officially opened this week, although the company was not forthcoming on details regarding the size and makeup of the facility. Previously, the company has referred to opening a data center when it was actually leasing space from a colocation provider.

Data centers in Frankfurt, Mumbai, Seoul and Moscow are expected to open later this year. 2017 will also see expansion at the Silicon Valley and Hong King sites.

“We want to enhance our overseas cloud capability to meet the rising demand from companies around the world as they look for fast, reliable, secure and cost-effective services during the global expansion and migration to the cloud era,” said Rita Zeng, VP of Tencent Cloud.

“I am confident that we can meet their needs with our technical capability, global network, as well as experience accumulated in serving the massive user-base in our home market.”

Last month, the company, which also owns the popular messaging platform WeChat, said that its cloud revenue had more than tripled year-on-year in 2016.

Tencent said that it hopes to serve both Chinese companies looking to go overseas, and international companies expanding their businesses in China or other parts of the world, a similar message to the one issued by its rival Alibaba when it announced its own expansion.