The latest investment is part of IBM’s $1.2 billion data centre expansion announced earlier this year, after its acquisition of cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer in 2013 for $2 billion.
The company announced on Wednesday that it has partnered with data centre provider Equinix for nine new cloud facilities located in France, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Japan and the US. The other three data centres in Germany, Mexico and Japan will be hosted on the SoftLayer platform. The expansion brings IBM’s facilities to 48 globally, surpassing its original target of reaching 40 centres this year.
The move underlines its aggressive strategy to continue growing revenues from cloud sales. In its latest quarter, IBM reported that its revenues from cloud services were running at an annualised rate of $3.1 billion, up 80% from a year before.
In October, IBM and Microsoft said that they were collaborating to provide their respective enterprise software on Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud. The partnership will make key IBM middleware such as WebSphere Liberty, MQ and DB2 available on Microsoft Azure. Windows Server and SQL Server will also be offered on the IBM Cloud.
