GUIYANG -- China Telecom, a leading Chinese telecom operator, broke ground for a cloud computing center in southwest China's Guizhou province on Monday.

The China Telecom Cloud Computing Guizhou Information Park covers an area of 500 mu (33.3 hectares) in the Gui'an New Area near the provincial capital of Guiyang.

The project, with an investment of 7 billion yuan ($1.14 billion), is expected to be operational by the end of 2014, providing high-speed storage and computing services for government departments, enterprises, financial institutions and Internet companies.

The first phase of the park, with an investment of 4 billion yuan, covers an area of 200 mu and comprises eight data centers, one power center and two support centers. It is expected to accommodate one million servers.

So far, clients have agreed to place more than 120,000 servers in the park.

"Guizhou, with its high altitude and abundant energy sources, is an ideal place to build the cloud computing center," said Wang Xiaochu, chairman of China Telecom, at the construction inauguration ceremony.

Cloud computing generally refers to services, including software and storage, accessed by users through the Internet, rather than on local machines or servers.

Also on Monday, Foxconn, the world's largest electronics contractor, started building a 260-hectare industrial park to the south of the China Telecom cloud computing park.