IBM is building a $360m data centre to gain a bigger foothold in the increasingly crowded cloud computing services market.

The firm’s latest information farm will be located at IBM’s Research Triangle Park facility in North Carolina.

Tech companies have lately been clambering to push to the front of the queue with their web-based offerings. Just this week HP, Intel and Yahoo! teamed up to build an enormous cloud for grounded boffins across the globe.

Elsewhere, proprietary software pusher Microsoft (whose bosses are busily supping on melon-flavoured Kool Aid) has been pushing the cloud-like software-plus-services virtualisation agenda for some time now, in what some might say is a doomed attempt to out-internet Google.

IBM’s latest data centre promises to dish up cloud services and infrastructure to a variety of punters. Big Blue will officially open the doors on the 60,000 square feet facility in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Later today IBM will cut the ribbon on its latest data farm in Tokyo, built to deliver cloud services to businesses, universities and government agencies in Japan.®

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