SHANGHAI, July 27 -- ADVANCED Micro Devices Inc yesterday signed a cooperation agreement with China Unicom on providing systems and services for the country's 20 million small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The latest agreement affirms AMD's ambition to expand into enterprise services after it grabbed market share from rival Intel Corp in the personal-computer sector, industry insiders said.

Under the agreement, AMD will provide China Unicom with tech support such as hardware and software testing and the country's No. 2 mobile carrier will promote the AMD-based system and value-added services to enterprise clients. Meanwhile, both sides will cooperate on promotion and share partners, according to an AMD statement delivered to Shanghai Daily yesterday. "The IT infrastructure demand of more than 20 million SMEs is surging and it will strengthen our product portfolio through the cooperation with upstream partners," said Li Zhengmao, China Unicom's vice president.

China Unicom has 150 million mobile-phone subscribers already and 12 million Internet users but it still faces competition pressure from leader China Mobile, which has about 350 million users.