The pact renews an existing agreement between the two firms signed in September 2014, under which Baidu would give priority to Seagate when selecting storage products and solutions, and Seagate would give advanced access to products, services and support to Baidu, as well as assign a dedicated team of engineers to the company.

The cooperation between the two parties builds on this, with Seagate providing double the amount of technical cooperation, and closer links to Baidu for its business needs. With regard to new products, Baidu will be at the forefront of Internet users in China implementing Seagate’s new storage products, and also the two sides will jointly develop customized systems to meet Baidu business needs. In addition, the procurement model for both companies will be further upgraded to save costs for each side.

Baidu is applying Seagate enterprise drives for its proprietary data center and public cloud platform. Due to their close link and cooperation, Seagate won the “Baidu Data Center 2016 Outstanding Partner Award” at the Baidu AI Developer Conference, and became the only provider who won this award among three major component (CPU, memory, hard disk) providers.

“We’ve been placing great emphasis on the mutual development and close cooperation with Baidu,” said BS Teh, senior vice president of global sales and sales operations at Seagate Technology. “As one of our most important strategic partners, Baidu will continue to get full support from Seagate, and we will further cooperate at a deeper level to jointly develop customized high-performance products to meet Baidu’s business needs.”

“As the top AI technology enterprise with leading data center technology worldwide, Baidu attached great importance to technology and welcomes innovation and solutions with open arms,” said Mr. Zhang Yaqin, president of Baidu.

“Baidu and Seagate have maintained close relations since 2014, and established close technological cooperation in the field of SMR, cloud storage and Helium hard disk drives, this contributes to the reduction of storage cost and improvement of storage quality as well as the enhanced competitiveness for Baidu. In the future, we also look forward to deepening cooperation with Seagate in order to solve various storage challenges in the era of big data, improve storage quality, efficiency and reliability, provide stronger support to the development of both companies as well.”