Events
Recently (from January 12 to February 16), the national development and Reform Commission, the central network and information office, the Ministry of industry and information technology and the National Energy Administration jointly issued documents, agreeing to start the construction of National Computing hub nodes in 8 places, including Beijing Tianjin Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao, Dawan District, Chengdu and Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and plan 10 national data center clusters, The project of “counting from the east to the west” was officially launched.
Commentary
I. purpose of “counting East and calculating West” project:
Improve the overall computing power level of the country and solve the problem of mismatch between the computing power demand of the East and the West and scarce resources such as land and energy. Build a new computing network system, effectively guide the business needs with low delay requirements such as background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup to the west, optimize the construction layout of the data center, guide the intensive, large-scale and green development of the data center, and promote the data circulation, value transmission and collaborative linkage between the East and the West.
II. Differences between this policy requirement and previous data center policy documents:
In addition to improving the overall computing power of the country, it also has the economic and political significance of promoting green development, expanding effective investment and promoting regional coordinated development. As a high energy consuming industry, the power consumption of data centers in China has accounted for 4% of the total social power consumption. Reducing energy consumption and improving the utilization rate of green power are important links of the new energy strategy. The data center has a long industrial chain and large investment scale. Through the construction of computing power hub and data center cluster, it is expected to drive the upstream and downstream investment of the industrial chain, promote regional balanced development, increase employment, and support the Western computing power hub to develop labor-intensive industries such as data processing, data cleaning and data content services around the data center.
Put forward higher requirements for energy consumption and average utilization of the data center. The three-year action plan for the development of new data centers (2021-2023) issued by the Ministry of industry and information technology in July 2021 requires that by the end of 2021, the average utilization rate of national data centers should be increased to more than 55%, and the pue of new large and above data centers should be reduced to less than 1. By the end of 2023, the average utilization rate of national data centers will strive to increase to more than 60%. The recent construction requirements of the four departments for the data center of each hub node are to speed up the completion of the construction goal, with the shelf rate of no less than 65% and the pue of no more than 1.2 or 1.25. It is conducive to accelerating the construction of new data centers and improving the overall resource utilization level of the industry. Enterprises with high resource utilization rate are expected to increase market share.
The policy is more practical and practical. “Counting from the east to the west” is not the first time. However, this series of documents put forward more detailed provisions on the energy consumption index, shelf availability and network service quality of the data center, allowing moderate concentration, promoting the integration of data center intensification and technological innovation, and requiring “coordinating the internal and proposed data center projects in the region, setting a reasonable transition period to ensure stable and orderly development”, For the data center projects with outstanding achievements in the implementation of “counting from the east to the west”, give priority to the support of energy consumption indicators to avoid unilateral control of energy consumption, “over correction” or “one size fits all”. From March 2022, the relevant situation needs to be reported to the four departments at the end of each quarter to dynamically monitor the construction situation and reflect the determination of policy implementation.
Investment advice
We maintain the “buy” rating of the industry, and the portfolio is: Kehua Data Co.Ltd(002335) , Shenzhen Envicool Technology Co.Ltd(002837) , China Mobile, Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) , Zhongji Innolight Co.Ltd(300308) . We believe that the relevant policies have laid the main tone for the four departments to encourage the healthy development of IDC industry. So far, China’s computing power has reached 130 eflops (130 billion floating-point operations per second). With the increasing penetration of digital economy, computing power has become an important infrastructure for national economic development. In the future, more traditional enterprises will go to the cloud. As the base of the digital economy, the cloud computing industry chain will continue to have a high boom, and the overall growth rate of the industry is expected to be more than 20%.
Risk tips
Policy promotion is less than expected, enterprises are less than expected to go to the cloud, and market style switching.
