Most conversations about entering the Chinese market start with the storefront, the localization plan, the go-to-market timeline. They rarely start with hosting. That's usually where things get complicated.
Here's the pattern we keep seeing: a global enterprise headquartered in Sydney, Chicago, London or wherever builds out a subsidiary, a retail presence or a customer base in China. At some point, someone on the platform team asks a question nobody planned for: where is this actually going to be hosted?
And the honest answer is that the infrastructure most SitecoreAI deployments run on wasn't built to operate inside Chinese borders.
This isn't a China-market problem. It's a global-enterprise-with-a-China-footprint problem. Different thing entirely.
SitecoreAI's pull is obvious: AI-powered personalization, composable architecture, next-generation digital experience and agentic capabilities. Teams already running it elsewhere want the same thing for their China-facing properties. Reasonable expectation. Wrong assumption.
A standard SitecoreAI deployment runs into three hard constraints the moment it targets a China-based audience:
None of this is a SitecoreAI problem. It's an infrastructure problem sitting one layer below it, and it's the layer most teams don't think about until they're already committed to the platform decision.
Arc by Dataweavers runs entirely inside the customer's own Azure tenant, on local China infrastructure, Azure and Cloudflare, with Next.js hosting, built-in governance and six-layer security, all under a single SLA from code release to end-customer experience. In-country, compliant, operational from day one. No separate vendor relationship to manage for the China piece, no bolt-on workaround.
Arc delivers this through Full In-Country Hosting, which puts compute, data and delivery inside China's borders. Next.js is deployed to an in-country Azure region, with content and media requests routed through Arc's accelerated proxy so they perform reliably and media is served from a local cache. It's the full-sovereignty path, and it comes with a real prerequisite: your organization needs to hold a local business license in-region to run it.
None of this asks you to rebuild your SitecoreAI investment from scratch. That's the point.
Deploying SitecoreAI headless in China surfaces infrastructure gaps that most platforms simply leave for the customer to figure out. We'd rather name them upfront:
Each of these is a known quantity with Arc. Left unaddressed, they're the kind of gaps that turn a straightforward SitecoreAI rollout into a six-month infrastructure investigation.
If your organization is planning a China-facing SitecoreAI deployment, or already has one running on infrastructure that's quietly out of compliance, the question isn't whether you need in-country hosting. It's which model gets you there without slowing down everything else your platform team is trying to ship.
We've built Arc specifically to answer that, and we're always happy to walk through which option fits your architecture. Reach out to hello@dataweavers.com or fill out our contact form to chat.