Event: on February 17, the national development and Reform Commission and other four departments jointly issued a notice on the implementation plan of the computing power hub of the collaborative innovation system of the national integrated big data center. The overall layout design of the national integrated big data center system was completed, and the “counting from the East to the west” project was officially launched. It is agreed to start the construction of National Computing hub nodes in 8 places, including Beijing Tianjin Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Great Bay area, Chengdu Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and 10 national data center clusters are planned.
Comments:
1. Why do we engage in “counting East and counting West”?
Under the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial reform, computing power, as the core productivity of digital economy, has become a new focus of global strategic competition. According to the high technology department of the national development and Reform Commission, up to now, the scale of China’s data center has reached 5 million standard racks and the computing power has reached 130 eflops (1.3 trillion floating-point operations per second). With the comprehensive and continuous penetration of digital technology into all fields of economy and society, the demand for computing power in the whole society is still very urgent, and it is expected to grow rapidly at a rate of more than 20% every year.
The cost of electricity in Western China is much lower than that in eastern China. Instead of “transmitting electricity from west to East” to the data center that consumes electricity, it is better to directly migrate the data center to the West. The development of data center industry in Western China has the advantages of suitable climate, sufficient energy and low land rental price. The construction of data center in Western China can greatly reduce the consumption of energy transportation by overlapping energy consumption and production. Compared with energy transportation, optical transmission can solve the problems of time delay and transmission bandwidth, and the investment cost is not as large as UHV.
Strengthening the construction of data centers in the western region is expected to eliminate the level difference of digital infrastructure in the central and western regions. After two waves of industrialization and Internet economy, the development of digital infrastructure in eastern and Western China is relatively unbalanced. The appropriate advance of infrastructure through the “counting from the east to the west” project is expected to feed the West and realize the balanced development of the whole territory through the development of digital economy.
2. What is the meaning of “counting from the east to the west”?
“Counting from the east to the west” is conducive to upgrading the computing power supply system, driving the economic development and industrial upstream and downstream investment in the eastern and western regions, and reducing the data transformation cost of small and medium-sized enterprises. At present, most of China’s data centers are located in the eastern region. Due to the increasing shortage of land, energy and other resources, it is difficult to sustain the large-scale development of data centers in the eastern region. Western China is rich in resources, especially renewable energy, and has the potential to develop data centers and undertake the computing power needs of the East. Therefore, we should give full play to the advantages of China’s system and mechanism, integrate the layout from a national perspective, optimize the allocation of resources and improve the efficiency of resource use. “Counting from the east to the west” refers to “transmitting” the data from the east to the West for storage and calculation by building an “information channel” similar to the “west to East Gas Transmission”, establishing a national computing hub node in the west, improving the unbalanced layout of digital infrastructure and giving full play to the optimal value of data capitalization.
3. Sorting out related industrial chain targets
With steady growth, the data center industry chain is long and the driving effect is strong. As a representative of the new infrastructure, it is expected to fully benefit from the promotion of the “counting from the east to the west” project and drive the overall investment expenditure of China’s cloud infrastructure sector. The data center industrial chain mainly includes upstream equipment, facilities and software suppliers, midstream IDC builders and service providers, and downstream application customers in various industries. The “East digital West computing” project is expected to drive the demand of IDC, ICT equipment, optical modules, operators, temperature control equipment, optical communication and other fields. We sorted out 31 related targets of the data center industrial chain.
Risk warning: the progress of “counting East and counting West” project is lower than expected; The construction progress of data center is lower than expected; Deterioration of supply and demand pattern; The demand for big data applications is lower than expected.
