The Hebei Cloud datacenter, being built by IBM about 35 miles from Beijing's center for the Chinese company Range Technology, will encompass 600,000 square feet in its first phase, to be housed in seven buildings. This would rank it among or near the top 10 largest datacenters in the world.

The initial phase is part of a planned campus that will take in 6.5 million square feet-about 150 acres-when completed in 2016. The campus includes room for additional datacenters, call centers, application development facilities, and housing and shopping to support the people who work there, according to an IBM spokesperson from the company's Singapore office.

The complex is located alongside a river, and "has access to a significant amount of power," this spokesperson told me. When asked whether this rather large complex is being built for domestic use only, the response was "yes, the datacenter is being built to host the IT operations of many businesses and government organizations in China."

To be clear, "IBM does not have an ownership stake" in this facility, the spokesperson said. "We are providing the services to help to design, build and support this world class, state-of-the-art facility. Range is the overall developer of the project and came to IBM for our expertise in IT, major datacenter design, construction and management, and cloud computing."

Range Technology has targeted health care as a primary benefactor of the datacenter's services, although, "as parts of the site come on stream, (IBM) expects that the solution set will become broader," according to IBM. The company already manages several million square feet of datacenters worldwide.