Apple has officially put its first Chinese data center in the southwestern province of Guizhou into operation this week.

Details: The data center, jointly built by Apple and Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), a company owned by the Guizhou provincial government, in Gui'an New Area, commenced operation on Tuesday, Xinhua News Agency reported.

To comply with China's strict cybersecurity laws, in 2017, Apple agreed to move its Chinese customers’ data to China and onto computers owned and run by the state-owned company.

Apple and GCBD also inserted new language into the Chinese iCloud terms and conditions that granted them “access to all data that you store on this service” and allowed the companies to share the data with each other.

Context: China’s Cybersecurity Law comes into effect on June 1, 2017. It requires network operators to store select data within China and allows Chinese authorities to conduct spot-checks on a company’s network operations. 

Foreign businesses establishing a data center presence in China have two main options. They can either build their own facility under a joint venture, or they can lease data center services and co-locate. 

Guizhou, located in southwestern China, is known as China’s Big Data Valley. The number of big-data-relevant enterprises in the province has soared from less than 1,000 in 2013 to 9,551 in 2018.