IBM is planning to invest some $360m in efforts to expand its cloud computing program.

The money will be spent primarily on a new data centre in North Carolina. Big Blue will renovate a building in its Research Triangle Park campus to house the new data centre, which will become part of IBM's larger cloud computing network.

The data centre will be modelled after IBM's facility in Boulder, Colorado. That data centre features designs aimed at cutting down energy consumption and allowing for easy scaling of systems.

Also part of the network will be a new cloud centre in Tokyo. The recently-launched data centre serves as one of eight cloud computing facilities IBM operates throughout the world.

The company hopes that the cloud program will allow for expansion of the field to everyday business, allowing companies to obtain computing power on-demand rather than purchase new IT hardware.

"Cloud computing is fundamentally about re-engineering the world's computing infrastructure to enable game-changing, even life-changing, applications," said Willy Chiu, IBM's vice president of high performance on demand solutions.

"To IBM, cloud computing is much more than the normal evolution of a data centre."