China outlines vision for 4 mega data centre clusters

Beijing

CHINA has approved plans to build 4 mega clusters of data centres in the country's north and west with the aim of supporting the data needs of Beijing and major coastal centres, said the country's top state planner on Wednesday (Dec 29).

The clusters will be built in the northern Inner Mongolia region, north-western Ningxia region, Gansu province and south-western Guizhou province, the National Development and Reform Commission said in 4 separate statements.

The 4 locations can use their energy and environmental advantages to set up green and low-carbon mega data centres, the state planner said.

The move comes as energy-hungry data centres located in China's east have found it difficult to expand due to limits imposed by local governments on electricity consumption.

Some cities in China's northern and western regions rich in renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar power, have already built data centres to serve the economically developed coast.

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But their distant locations have meant the centres have struggled to provide the near-instantaneous retrieval demanded by coastal clients with little tolerance for delays.

It is unclear how China would turn western and northern regions such as Ningxia and Gansu, which are 1,000 km from the coast, into actively operating centres of computing power given the data latency caused by the huge distances to data users in the east.

A marine economy development plan published on Dec 14 encouraged major coastal cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai to relocate high energy-consuming data centres to underwater locations to cut energy used for cooling.

China aims to expand its big data industry into a more than 3 trillion yuan (S$637.9 billion) sector by 2025 through the building of several clusters of data centres, said a 2021-2025 plan by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released in November. REUTERS