Apple is moving its Chinese iCloud operations to a local firm
Apple is outsourcing its Chinese iCloud operations to a local firm in southern China starting on February 28th, as spotted by 9to5Mac. The move has been known since last year when Apple announced its partnership with the firm, but the exact date was confirmed today.
The firm is called Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD). It’s based in Guizhou Province and supervised by a board ran by government-owned businesses. In emails to mainland Chinese customers, Apple says that the move enables “us to continue improving the speed and reliability of iCloud and to comply with Chinese regulations.”
But there’s also the chance that closer ties with the Chinese government might mean more regulation, which Apple has a record of abiding closely to in the…
