Amazon brings its cloud computing to China

US company's announcement to provide new services setting off price wars, influx of vendors, Meng Jing reports

Amazon.com Inc made quite a splash in mid-December by announcing it will extend its cloud-computing services - Amazon Web Services - to China, beginning with a limited preview in early 2014.

Hours before Amazon's official announcement, Aliyun, the cloud-computing arm of China's e-commerce king Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, said it will cut the price of its services by up to 35 percent. Hours later, IBM jumped on the bandwagon and announced it is teaming up with a local partner to provide high-end smart cloud services to enterprise users in China.