(Yicai Global) Dec. 26 -- Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has penned a deal to build and maintain 5G data centers for the Guangdong arm of China Telecom, one of the country's three state-owned carriers.

Tencent has selected several locations for large data centers this year in order to prepare for the next few years, Gao Jiang, product director for Tencent's data centers, said at the signing ceremony yesterday. 5G is increasing the need for underlying computer power in telecoms, he added, saying that Tencent and China Telecom plan to use an operations management system to run the data center.

"Manufacturers give you tools, but how you use them is your own business," Gao told Yicai Global on the differences between Tencent and product makers like Huawei. "Tencent provides not just the tools, but also management experience."

The rapid rise of data centers is bringing about problems in terms of investment, energy consumption, low efficiency, Gao said, while introducing the Tencent Smart Maintenance Platform as a solution to the problem. The infrastructure management software helps customers fully understand the operating condition of their data centers and it can constantly optimize operations to reduce costs, he added.

Tencent penned a similar deal with China Telecom's Chongqing arm in November, pledging to improve energy efficiency by 30 percent.

The firm has deployed 1,100 acceleration nodes for content delivery networks across China so far, and over 200 in other 30 countries and regions. The company, which has more servers at its data centers than any other Chinese enterprise, aims to put servers closer to users to speed up web connections.

Editor: James Boynton