IT giant IBM has revealed that it plans to spend $1 billion on data centre facilities around the globe in order to support IT services delivery to emerging markets.

The money will go towards building new data centres and expanding existing facilities. This will help IBM to access emerging markets such as Egypt, Argentina and China, the company said, which it hopes will contribute a quarter of its revenues by 2015.

"This $1 billion plus multi-year campaign is twofold, [to] improve the design and technology used in client data centres and expand geographic reach," the company said.

In 2008, IBM built its first cloud computing centre in Wuxi, China, in partnership with the local government. Based on the company’s Blue Cloud technology, the Wuxi Cloud Centre gives government departments and local software developers a scalable cloud platform for their applications.