The forecast is more than double the $100 billion over 10 years given last month by another executive at the world's No. 3 PC brand, and comes as Dell spends to boost sales to large corporations and in smaller Chinese cities, Amid Midha, Dell's head of Greater China and South Asia, said at the Reuters China Investment Summit.

Dell is on track to spend $25 billion in China this year, and is likely to spend $250 billion over 10 years if it continues spending at the current rate, Midha said.

"China, all of a sudden, is starting to become the centerpiece for us," Midha said at the summit, held at the Reuters office in Beijing.

"If you think about it, be it design, manufacturing, procurement, sales, service support, there's more and more that can be done more effectively in China than in many other places."

Dell will also launch a 10-inch tablet PC globally by the spring of 2011, Midha said, declining to give a more specific timeframe.

The new tablets would complement Dell's existing lines of 5- and 7-inch models, riding a wave of popularity sparked by Apple's iPad earlier this year.

Like its rivals Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, Dell is increasingly looking to mobile devices and data services to diversify away from the heavily commoditized personal computers, where net margins can fall to the low single digits.