Huawei has extended its reach across Eurasia, renting 500 racks in data centres across Russia to localise their services for the market. The racks are residing in facilities owned by 3Data, IXcellerate and DataPro, according to Russian news site Kommersant.

Russia has pretty extreme data sovereignty laws, stipulating that any information held by Russian companies must be stored within the country and this meant companies such as Huawei couldn’t really serve customers in the country.

Huawei supposedly wants to use its latest rentals to support a range of its services, including enabling Russians to make use of its Huawei Pay payment system and the development of services for third parties.

Although it already has some space in data centres in the country, this is a significant step forward for Huawei. The company apparently started moving some of its infrastructure into Russia last year, with 80 racks already in use, but this is a major step forward. At the end of last year, Kommersant said Huawei had 200 servers up and running in the country, but this will rise to 500 by the end of the year.

“We have already entered into a licensing agreement with Microsoft, we are working on solutions with other vendors to provide software from our cloud, and we are also considering partnerships with operators in order to give them the opportunity to resell our cloud,” said Arthur Pärn, director of solutions for Huawei Cloud in Russia.

It’s also a pretty big snub of the US, which is trying to ban Chinese firms such as Huawei from selling its services in the country. Although Russia and the US share a pretty turbulent relationship, this move by Huawei could tighten relations between China and Russia.