What is the impact of the East-West Project on China's data center industry?

On February 17, 2022, 8 national computing hub nodes and 10 national data center clusters completed the approval, the national integrated big data center system completed the overall layout design, and the project of "counting the east and counting the west" was officially launched in an all-round way. Since then, there has been a national discussion on the national strategy of the data center and its industrial development.

The purpose of the project is to promote the moderate agglomeration and intensive development of data centers across the country, to promote the echelon layout and overall development of data centers from east to west, and to realize the gradual and rapid iteration of the project. In the era of global economic restructuring, the successful construction of this project will give birth to new technologies, new industries, new business type and new models, which will effectively support the high-quality development of China's economy.

The data released at the 2021 China International big data Industrial Expo show that since 2015, China's data has increased at an average annual rate of more than 30%. In 2019, the amount of data generated in China accounts for about 9.3% of the world, ranking second in the world. As a result, the demand for numeracy is getting higher and higher. In response to a reporter's question on the situation of "counting the east and counting the west", the responsible comrade of the High Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission said that computing power, as the core productive force of the digital economy, has become a new focus of global strategic competition.

Liu Chi, associate dean and professor of Beijing Institute of Technology computer School, said that the data memory not only can be stored, but also needs to be able to calculate. Now this memory is called the "computing power center," with more emphasis on "computing power." So, "computing center" and "data center" essentially mean the same thing, but from a technical point of view, they are not quite the same. Computing center is the 2.0 version of the data center and an upgraded version of it. Compared with the traditional data center, the computing center puts forward higher requirements for land, energy, climate and other conditions, which is also one of the reasons for the implementation of the project.

Liu Shiping, a professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Financial Technology Research Center, said the most beneficial industry may be the green energy industry, and data centers are also known as "smoke-free factories" that consume a lot of electricity. The power of a single cabinet is about 3-6kW, and the cabinet power of a high-performance supercomputing data center can reach 20-30kW, so it is very tight in the eastern region. Judging from the current energy structure, 70% of the power supply of the data center comes from coal power (thermal power), which has something to do with the power consumption characteristics of the data center, because green power is not too stable to achieve sustainable supply. what data centers fear most is power outages, which of course has something to do with the power structure of our country. In the future, under the goal of "double carbon", it will be used to supply wind power and photovoltaic power to the data center, and the hydroelectric power in Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan will be promising. The upstream infrastructure industry will also benefit. For example, the Seven Star disaster Preparedness data Center in Gui'an, Guizhou Province, covers a total area of 470000 square meters, with a tunnel area of more than 30, 000 square meters alone. more new data centers will be built in the future, bringing great opportunities to civil builders and equipment manufacturers. In addition, there are a large number of machines and equipment in the data center, which need the support of high-performance computing chips: related high-performance computing chips, communication chips, interface chips and other hardware facilities are expected to increase. This can promote the development of intelligent manufacturing, especially the development of domestic high-end chips.

Experts from the National Development and Reform Commission believe that the "counting from east to west" project will promote the ecological growth of the data center industry, improve the data center industrial ecosystem, strengthen the agglomeration of equipment manufacturing industry upstream of the data center and the flow of downstream data elements, innovative data applications and new consumer industries, and support the western computing hub to develop labor-intensive industries such as data processing, data cleaning, and data content services locally around the data center.

With the implementation of the "calculation of the East and the West" project, at present, Chengdu-Chongqing region, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, the Yangtze River Delta region and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region have started to build national integrated computing network national hub nodes, through the construction of typical demonstration projects, smoothly and reasonably pass through the transition period to ensure the orderly development of the project.

(collated according to the public information on the Internet)