“Counting East and counting West” is hot.
On February 21, the market of “counting East and counting West” concept stocks rose, led by the opening. Among them, Capitalonline Date Service Co.Ltd(300846) , Yimikang Tech.Group.Co.Ltd(300249) , Insigma Technology Co.Ltd(600797) and other stocks rose by the limit. As of press time, the data show that the index of “counting East and counting West” has increased by more than 9%.
Just last week, 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, The project of “counting from the east to the west” was officially launched.
A new round of chess construction is under way, in which the data center is the core and foundation. However, the project of “counting from the east to the west” is not achieved overnight. Large scale infrastructure construction takes time, and the construction and investment will continue in a long period of time.
He Baohong, director of the Institute of cloud computing and big data of the Chinese Academy of communications and communications, once said that the market scale of China’s data center will be 150 billion yuan in 2020, and the average annual growth rate will continue to be about 30%, much higher than the average annual growth rate of 10% in the world. Under the guidance of policies, a large number of state-owned and private capital have poured into the data center investment and financing market. According to the calculation of China information and Communication Research Institute, the investment will reach 300 billion yuan in 2020 and will increase by 1.4 trillion yuan in the next three years.
At the same time, enterprises and institutions have arranged one after another and accelerated their participation in the project of “counting from the east to the west” around the upstream and downstream of the data center. Different from the data centers built by enterprises in the past, the unified planning and construction will be carried out in China this time. Next, how to integrate resources, how to participate in market forces, how to share and build on the original facilities, etc. are the focus of the industry.
“counting East and counting West” swept the whole industrial chain
The 14th five year plan for the development of digital economy also proposes to accelerate the implementation of the project of “counting East and counting West”, which is closely related to big data and computing industry.
At present, China’s digitization process is accelerating. With the rapid growth of digital assets in the online world, digital management is becoming more and more important, which requires more powerful computing support. In recent years, the construction of data center is in full swing. From the perspective of layout, he Baohong pointed out that China’s data centers are increasingly showing an obvious “dumbbell type”: one is concentrated in the East and first tier cities, and the other is concentrated in resource rich areas. During the first wave of boom (2010), China’s data centers were highly concentrated in places with dense Internet users, such as first tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In recent years, with the introduction and guidance of relevant national and local policies and the economic considerations of enterprises, more and more data centers, especially large and super large data centers, have selected sites in the central and western regions.
The person in charge of data business of a software company pointed out to the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that, on the one hand, computing power has multiple levels, including storage, calculation, algorithm, etc. without storage, there will be no data, without data, there will be no value of computing power, and big data and computing power complement each other; On the other hand, more than half of the cost of the data center is electricity. From the perspective of resources, the essence of computing power is electricity. Building a data center in the West or around the city plays a great role in improving energy consumption.
With the promotion of the policy, “counting from the east to the west” is accelerating the implementation of all links of the industrial chain. According to the latest 2022 data center industry map research report released by China Academy of information and communications technology, the data center industry mainly includes upstream equipment, facilities and software suppliers, midstream IDC builders and service providers, and application customers in downstream industries.
There are many industries involved in the upstream, including ICT equipment such as power supply and distribution system, exchanger, server, dynamic environment monitoring system and data center management system, including Huawei, Lenovo, Huanyu Electric, Weidi technology, abb and other enterprises.
Liu Miao, general manager of service program business of Lenovo enterprise technology group, told the 21st Century Business Herald that through cooperation with China’s Data Center partners, Lenovo Group has preliminarily completed the layout of green data center resources in western regions such as Ningxia, Gansu and Inner Mongolia, Relying on these resources, it is actively carrying out business cooperation with internet manufacturers based on Lenovo truscale. At the same time, Lenovo Group is working with its partners in hot spots such as Beijing and Tianjin in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, Shanghai and Jiangsu in the Yangtze River Delta, Zhuhai Hengqin and Shenzhen in the Great Bay area of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao.
Midstream is mainly a data center builder, including China’s three major telecom operators and third-party IDC service providers such as century Internet. It is understood that at present, Century Internet has planned the “calculation from the east to the west” project, including the data center project with an area of 200 mu and a total investment of more than 3 billion yuan in Ulanqab in the next 3-5 years.
The biggest demand downstream is cloud computing. Alibaba cloud, Tencent cloud, Huawei cloud, ucloud and other manufacturers continue to invest. Tencent cloud has long had layout in Guizhou and Chongqing. Ucloud has two self built data centers in Qingpu, Shanghai and Wulanchabu, Inner Mongolia. In addition, byte beat’s volcanic engine said that it has deployed a large number of CDN nodes across the country to provide transmission acceleration services.
computing power brings new industrial opportunities
With the combination of new infrastructure and new energy policies, “counting from the east to the west” ushers in a new outlet, which will also drive the new development of the computing industry.
Recalling the policy timeline, in March 2020, the national development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of industry and information technology issued the notice on organizing the implementation of new infrastructure construction projects in 2020 (broadband network and 5g field), which clearly proposed to speed up the construction progress of 5g network, data center and other new infrastructure.
Among them, data center is the key area. In the same year, leading enterprises also invested continuously in data center and cloud computing. Alibaba cloud announced that it would invest another 200 billion yuan in the next three years for the construction of data center, while Tencent announced that it would invest 500 billion yuan for the further layout of new infrastructure and industrial Internet.
However, the data center is a large power consumer. The power consumption of China’s data center accounts for about 2% of the power consumption of the whole society. The topic of energy conservation and emission reduction of the data center has been discussed for a long time. In May 2021, 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 the implementation plan of the computing hub of the collaborative innovation system of the national integrated big data center; Then in July, the Ministry of industry and information technology released the three-year action plan for the development of new data centers (2021-2023); By February 2022, the construction of 8 major computing power hub nodes will be started, and the “counting from the east to the west” project will be officially launched.
Xu Bin, deputy director of the Innovation Driven Development Center (digital economy research and Development Center) of the national development and Reform Commission, said in an interview with the media: “in terms of economy, (‘counting East and counting West’) It can drive the investment of 400 billion yuan every year. For western industries, the construction of data center and other facilities will bring relevant IT industries, such as data labeling, data flow processing and other industries to the west, which is beneficial to the western development; In terms of social benefits, it is also very helpful for the realization of carbon peak and carbon emission strategy; In terms of security, the data in the East is the vast majority of our country’s data. Under special circumstances, if there is backup in the west, it obviously has the advantage of security.
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On the one hand, “counting from the east to the west” plays an important role in realizing a low-carbon society. Xu Bin said: “at present, the utilization rate of green power in the data center is about 20%. Through the ‘counting from the east to the West’ project, after a large number of data centers are built in the west, improve the use of green energy such as photovoltaic wind power. If it can be increased from 20% to 80%, it can reduce the total carbon emissions of 1.6 Beijing cities by 2025.”
In addition to the energy conservation and emission reduction of the data center, Xu Bin also pointed out that promoting the development of digital economy is the key link for the whole society to achieve the dual carbon goal. If the efficiency is improved through the artificial intelligence and big data technology supported by the data center, the effect on carbon reduction will be very obvious.
On the other hand, it also plays a role in the reform and development of software and hardware industry. The person in charge of the aforementioned data business told reporters that under the condition of overall construction, the use of domestic hardware equipment may increase, which is also an opportunity. Some senior figures in the data center industry also said that “counting from the east to the west” will help cost sensitive applications, such as blockchain applications, big data mining, AI computing power, etc. after large-scale low-cost training in the west, more efficient applications may be produced, so as to improve the efficiency of the whole society.
For the cloud industry, Dai Kun, chief analyst of Forrester, told 21st Century Business Herald: “The National Computing hub can more effectively guide the cloud computing industry to achieve intensive, large-scale and green development. At the same time, it can break the barriers of the traditional cloud computing industry, face multi cloud collaboration in public cloud, industrial cloud and other fields, enhance the service quality and utilization efficiency of computing power, improve the level of cross regional computing power scheduling and data security guarantee ability, promote the orderly flow of data and further deepen it Intelligent data application to meet the needs of the implementation of major regional development strategies. “
