Data centers are heading out west
National computing capacity project tackles uneven development of China’s eastern and western regions
China is taking steps to channel more computing resources from its eastern regions to its less developed yet resource-rich western regions. The move is expected to inject new impetus into the digital economy and promote high-quality, sustainable development as well as help reach the goals of carbon peak and carbon neutrality, officials and industry experts said.
It also dovetails with the acceleration of construction on an integrated national big data system, which is of great significance in boosting the free flow of data, optimizing the energy efficiency of data centers, speeding up digital transformation and upgrading industries, they said.
The country has recently approved the building of eight national computing hubs and plans for 10 national data center clusters as a way to improve overall computing power and resource efficiency, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic regulator. Those projects, which mark the completion of the overall layout for the national integrated big data center system, were jointly approved by the NDRC and three other central government departments.
The eight national computing hubs will be built in the BeijingTianjin-Hebei and Yangtze River Delta regions, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, the Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions and Guizhou and Gansu provinces, according to the NDRC.
“Computing power has already become an important infrastructure for national economic development,” the NDRC said on its website, adding that it expects the country’s demand for computing power to surge by more than 20 percent annually in the coming years.
While most of China’s data centers are in eastern regions, shortages of land and energy resources in those areas threaten the sustained development of the data centers, it stated.
China’s western regions, however, have no shortage of resources, especially renewable energy. That gives them the potential to nurture the development of data centers that meet the needs of data computing in eastern areas.
The projects also will help improve the nation’s overall computing capacity, promote green development, boost investment in the industrial chain of data centers and facilitate the coordination of development among different regions, the NDRC said.
In the next step, China will speed up efforts to improve the influence of the eight national computing hubs to drive the integrated and coordinated development of data computing across the nation.
Building a national computing power network will enable the less developed regions to handle and store data transmitted from the economically advanced areas, optimize resource allocation and enhance efficient use of resources. That, in turn, will resolve excessive data surges and imbalances in regional computing capacity, experts said.
“The construction of computing power hubs and data center clusters is expected to drive 400 billion yuan ($62.9 billion) in investment each year,” said Xu Bin, deputy director of the Innovation-driven Development Center, affiliated with the NDRC.
“The project is also expected to attract related IT industries, such as data annotation and data flow processing, to western regions, and help achieve the dual carbon goals,” he said. Annotation is modifying raw data so machines can read it and act on it.
A large number of data centers are poised for location in western regions, which will greatly increase
the use of green energy like photovoltaic and wind power, Xu said, adding that cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data underpinned by data centers, will contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions.
After years of development, China has taken a leading global position in big data. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology unveiled a plan for the big data sector’s development during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), envisaging a scale topping 3 trillion yuan by the
end of 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of around 25 percent.
The MIIT reported that China’s big data sector grew rapidly over the past five years, with the scale exceeding 1 trillion yuan by 2020.
“With the rapid development and commercial application of 5G, the internet of things, AI and the industrial internet, the demand for data processing is increasing, which has driven the construction of data centers across the nation,” said Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Information Consumption Alliance, a telecom industry association.
“The establishment of national computing hubs will improve efficiency in the use of computing resources, promote the free flow of data and bolster the high-quality development of the digital economy,” said Xiang, adding that Chinese high-tech companies should utilize innovative technologies to improve data centers’ operational efficiency and cut power and energy consumption.
“Specifically, the project can effectively take advantage of the relatively abundant energy and low annual average temperatures in western China to reduce overall energy consumption,” said Charlie Dai, a principal analyst at Forrester, a business strategy and economic consultancy.
“It will also address the uneven development of China’s eastern and western regions in terms of infrastructure, economy and society, powering the digital economy through core technologies like cloud computing, big data and AI,” Dai said.
Tech giants from home and abroad are moving in that same direction. Apple Inc, Huawei Technologies Co and Tencent Holdings Ltd have built data centers in Guizhou province due to its cooler climate and ample power resources. Investment in data centers in Guian New Area in the province is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan by 2025, according to the area’s big data development service center.
It said the average power usage effectiveness of the data centers — a measurement of how efficiently a center uses its power — has been found to comply with the government guideline to promote green data centers.
Liu Miao, general manager of service solution business at Lenovo Enterprise Technology Group, said Lenovo has preliminarily completed the layout of green data centers in Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia.
“We are also actively expanding our presence in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Shenzhen and tapping into the fields of edge computing, cross-border finance and artificial intelligence,” he said. Edge computing means bringing computing as close to the source of data as possible.
Liu added that the company will participate in the computing resource transfer project in the areas of computing resource services, data circulation and integration, and data security protection. “The project will also drive the vast western regions to take part in the wave of digital economy led by cutting-edge technologies and help them better realize rapid development.”
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, has set up over 100 data centers in 25 regions around the world, and five of them are super data centers with massive numbers of servers.
Alibaba Cloud’s super data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, started providing cloud computing services in June 2020. The data center mainly uses renewable energy sources, such as wind and photovoltaic power.
The company’s western cloud computing center and data service base was launched in Chengdu, Sichuan province, in November 2020.
Tencent said it will optimize the layout of existing data centers and improve cross-regional computing power allocation to bolster the intensive, large-scale and green development of data centers and empower the digital economy.
Amid the resources transfer project, “a large number of digital economy companies engaged in services such as data storage and offline data analysis may buy cloud services from data centers in western regions, to realize the allocation of computing and storage resources, effectively lowering operating costs and earning extra profits,” said Wang Qing, deputy chief engineer of the Industry and Planning Research Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
During the process of data transmission, Wang said, physical facilities, network security, data security and information security may face multiple risks. More efforts should be made to establish network facilities with high reliability and to carefully monitor network security, he added.