Cupertino-based Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) has officially opened its first Chinese data centre in the southwestern province of Guizhou.

The landmark ribbon cutting marks the advancement of iCloud services provisioning to customers across Mainland China.

State-run press agency Xinhua reports that the data centre is expected to further improve Chinese users’ experience in terms of access speed and service reliability, as well as improve the overall reliability of Apple’s products and services across the country. 

The facility, located in the same region where Huawei, Tencent and Alibaba have data centres, was jointly built by Apple and Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry Co., Ltd. in Gui’an New Area, through an agreement signed in 2017.

The agreement was made as an answer to Beijing’s 2016 cybersecurity law which stipulated that Chinese citizens’ data needed to reside in the country.

Apple is currently working on the development of another hyperscale site in the Inner Mongolia region in China’s north.