International users can soon get their hands on 10TB of free cloud storage from China’s Tencent

Chinese Internet giant Tencent is looking to dole out a jaw-dropping 10TB worth of free cloud storage to its international users soon, as it seeks to roll out an English version of its cloud storage product next year, PandoDaily reports.

Peter Zheng, the Shenzhen-based vice president of Tencent’s social network group, tells PandoDaily that the company will bring its cloud storage offering to the US in early 2014. It is also launching an English version of Story Camera, an Instagram-like watermark-based photo app already popular in China, in the next two to three weeks.

In August, Tencent started courting Chinese users with its very generous gift of space — as it sought to out-do its rivals Baidu and Qihoo, which started giving away 1TB worth of free storage.

As Tencent gets into the game with an English version of its cloud storage service though, it looks set to attract way more users around the world who want to get their hands on this colossal amount of space — which, to be honest, seems almost impossible to finish using.

The whopping 10TB puts the free space given by Dropbox, Box and Microsoft to shame. At their maximum amounts, Dropbox has offered free space amounts ranging from 25-50GB as part of promotional deals with Samsung and HTC, Box has offered 50GB of free storage with file-size limitations before, and Microsoft upped the storage space for its SkyDrive Pro offering from 7GB to 25GB.

However, just as with the Chinese rollout, Tencent will likely kick in the same caveat for its cloud storage offering — that is, you won’t get the whole 10TB worth of space at one go. Instead, Tencent will top up your storage space as you deplete it.

To put privacy concerns at ease, Zheng tells Pandodaily that the international data will probably be stored on servers outside of China — in the same way that Tencent’s messaging service WeChat uses servers in the US and Southeast Asia.

As Tencent is taking big strides to conquer overseas markets — early this month it was said to be vying to lead an investment round into Snapchat, after it led a $150 million investment in design-focused e-commerce service Fab in June — offering cloud storage like this could be a great trojan horse for promoting its services in the US.

(hat/tip Sinocism)

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