Events
On February 17, the national development and Reform Commission, the central network information office, the Ministry of industry and information technology and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a document, agreeing to start the construction of National Computing hub nodes in 8 places, including Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao, Dawan District, Chengdu and Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planned 10 national data center clusters. So far, the overall layout design of the national integrated big data center system has been completed, and the "counting from the east to the west" project has been officially launched.
Key investment points:
Optimize the resource allocation of the data center and balance the supply of computing power in the East and West: the data center is an industry with strong resource endowment, and land, electricity price and water resources have a great impact on its cost and construction. At present, most of China's data centers are located in the eastern region. Under the tight situation 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. It has obvious advantages in electricity price and water resources, meets the construction standard of green data center, and has the potential to develop data center and undertake the computing power demand of the East. "Counting from the east to the west" arranges eight computing power hubs nationwide, guides large data centers to gather in the hubs, and can flow the data from the east to the West for storage and computing. It is expected to drive the construction of IDC clusters in the west, optimize resource allocation and improve resource utilization efficiency, which is good for the whole industrial chain of IDC.
The data center may meet the optimization of the competition pattern and open up incremental space in the West: "counting from the east to the west" will divert the needs of different computing power between the East and the West. Industrial Internet, finance, telemedicine, artificial intelligence reasoning and other businesses with high requirements for time delay can be arranged in Eastern hubs such as Beijing Tianjin Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Bay area and so on. The western data center mainly deals with businesses with low requirements for time delay, such as background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup. We believe that the scarcity of IDC resources in the eastern core region will become more prominent in the future. With the gradual transfer of low-value businesses to the west, IDC manufacturers in the eastern region may usher in the liquidation. At present, IDC companies in the head of more hot spots are expected to obtain more high-value businesses, and the competition pattern of the market may be improved. For the western region, IDC is expected to usher in incremental demand. The project of "counting from the east to the west" clearly proposes that the average shelf rate of data centers in the cluster should reach at least 65%. At the same time, the Internet between the East and the West and the direct network between hub nodes should be optimized to provide basic supporting facilities for supply and ensure the effective implementation of demand. At present, there is still much room to improve the availability of IDC in the western region. With the improvement of network infrastructure driven by policies, the demand for low latency computing power in the East is expected to migrate to the western region on a large scale. We believe that manufacturers with IDC resource layout in the western region have certain first mover advantages and are expected to benefit first.
Clarify the development goal of green energy conservation, and the energy consumption requirements tend to be strict: the main regulatory direction of the current policy is the greening of the data center. The project of "counting from the east to the west" requires that the utilization rate of renewable energy should be significantly improved, and it is clear that the pue of each cluster data center should be less than 1.25. With the wide application of 5g, AI and other new generation information technologies, cloud manufacturers' demand for high computing power has increased, resulting in greater energy consumption. In the context of double carbon, we believe that the project of "counting from the east to the west" will focus on supporting the construction of green data center, and manufacturers with excellent energy consumption control ability and meeting the requirements of green data center are expected to benefit. At the same time, the temperature control manufacturers upstream of IDC are also expected to usher in development opportunities.
Risk factors: the implementation of policies is less than expected, the capital expenditure of cloud manufacturers is less than expected, and the demand for computing power in the western region is less than expected
