Samsung just bought an Amazon cloud competitor backed by Peter Thiel and Intel

Samsung has purchased Joyent, a cloud-computing platform provider that had previously raised $125 million from the likes of Peter Thiel and Intel Capital.

Joyent competes with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other large tech companies in the field of public cloud-computing services, where customers can swipe a credit card and get access to fundamentally unlimited computing power.

"[Until] today, we lacked one thing. We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud-computing market," Joyent CEO Scott Hammond writes in a blog entry.

Hammond also affirms that the ten-year-old Joyent will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of Samsung, helping it get into the cloud-computing platform game.

Joyent's big claim to fame is that it was a big proponent of the mega-hot software container technology, long before the buzzed-about $1 billion startup Docker came onto the scene with similar technology. It also shepherded the popular Node.js programming language.

This acquisition is likely to bolster Samsung's strategy around smart home devices, which often require the backing of cloud services like Joyent's to store data, handle the heavy lifting of computation, and deliver data to smartphones and other gadgetry.

Additionally, Joyent says that it will continue to serve its customers, and that this will help the company build out its expertise in building services to help power mobile apps, which is a crucial market as the world increasingly relies on smartphone-borne software.

Either way, the bottom line is that Samsung is investing in beating Amazon Web Services at its own game.