Recently, 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 a notice 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, and the project of “computing from the east to the west” was officially launched. The “number” in the “Eastern digital Western computing” refers to data (big data), “computing” refers to computing power, that is, the processing capacity and computing capacity of data. The “Eastern digital Western computing” refers to the development of a data center by taking advantage of the cost and geographical advantages of the western region (or underdeveloped regions) to calculate and process the data and demand generated by the economic activities of the eastern region (or more developed regions). According to the notice, Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Dawan district will start the construction of a national hub node of the national integrated computing network, plan to set up a Shaoguan Data Center cluster, undertake the real-time computing needs of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places, and build a real-time computing center radiating South China and even the whole country. Shaoguan is an underdeveloped area in the north of Guangdong Province, but the geological conditions are conducive to the safe and reliable operation of the data center. As one of the major power supply bases in Guangdong Province, Shaoguan City has the lowest electricity price for large industries in the province and is the necessary fulcrum of the national optical fiber primary network node from Beijing to Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Dawan district (Guangzhou). Shaoguan has a provincial big data Industrial Park “South China Digital Valley”, which has gathered projects such as Huashao data Valley, and the big data industry has a good foundation. The selection of Shaoguan for Dawan district’s “counting East and counting West” project also contains the experience that the central government hopes to explore and realize the common prosperity of regional cities with the help of Dawan district’s industrial driving role. The main concerns are as follows:
First, the “counting from the east to the west” project will help speed up the infrastructure investment in Dawan district. According to historical experience, when the internal and external economic environment changes and the downward pressure on the economy increases, infrastructure can play a supporting role in the economy. Since 2022, under the expectation of China’s steady growth, the central and local governments have made clear the direction of investment in traditional infrastructure, new energy infrastructure and major engineering projects, and the “counting from the east to the west” project is an important organizational part of the new infrastructure. 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 strategic positioning of “counting from the east to the west” can be compared with national projects such as “South-to-North Water Transfer” and “west to East power transmission”. The annual investment volume will reach hundreds of billions of yuan and the pulling effect on relevant industries will reach 1:8. It will not only be conducive to steady growth and invigorating the industrial economy this year, but also promote the accurate development of data centers and save resources by coordinating and optimizing the layout. As early as November 2020, Guangdong Province issued the three-year implementation plan for promoting the construction of new infrastructure (2020-2022), which deployed Guangdong to promote the construction of new infrastructure. In the 2022 government work report of Guangdong Province, it is also proposed to promote the high-quality development of the northern ecological development zone and strive to turn the short board into a “potential board”, in which the development of data center industry is the focus. In July 2020, Shenzhen also issued the implementation opinions on accelerating the construction of new infrastructure (2020-2025), which also made it clear that we should deploy new infrastructure in advance, sort out 95 new infrastructure projects, with a total investment of 411.9 billion yuan, including 28 information and data center infrastructure such as 5g network, satellite communication and computing facilities. The Shaoguan Data Center cluster will upgrade the network level to the national backbone network hub node, which will guide the agglomeration of large and super large (more than 3000) data centers in the province. By 2025, Shaoguan Data Center cluster will build 500000 standard racks and 5 million servers, with an investment of more than 50 billion yuan (excluding servers and software).
Second, the project of “counting from the east to the west” will drive the development of data center industry in Dawan district. With the acceleration of national digital transformation and driven by the trend of soaring demand for cloud computing, the data center industry has also entered a period of rapid growth. In the future, the “East digital West computing” project will promote the transformation, upgrading and development of the bay area from multiple dimensions. First, help local governments attract investment from excellent Internet companies. The data center industry is conducive to further optimizing the business environment in Dawan district and attracting more technology companies to settle in the Bay district. Following the Tencent and Ali, in February 2022, Baidu Intelligent Cloud (Guangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. was also formally established and settled. It will push the region to accelerate the process of new infrastructure and industrial integration in a wider range of dimensions. Second, enrich Internet application scenarios and help entity enterprises improve quality and efficiency. Huawei cloud, as the leading big data company in the bay area, launched Dongguan Industrial Internet platform in July 2021, gathering ecological partners such as tree root Internet, Kingdee, UFIDA and Fanxiang marketing customers to help Dongguan achieve transformation and upgrading in industrial fields such as electronic information, Siasun Robot&Automation Co.Ltd(300024) and intelligent equipment, new energy and biopharmaceutical. With the support of the platform, deput, a well-known electronic enterprise in Dongguan, has built a data-driven intelligent factory, which has achieved the results of improving the direct product yield by 5%, reducing the workshop manufacturing cost by 12 million and improving the production efficiency by 10%, and realizing the trinity of quality improvement, cost reduction and efficiency increase. Third, save operating costs of Internet companies and enhance market competitiveness. Through calculation and classification, Internet companies can transfer non real-time computing power needs such as background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup to the west, so as to save operating costs. At present, Tencent has layout in Guizhou, Beijing Tianjin Hebei, Chengdu Chongqing and other hub nodes, and Huawei cloud has five data centers in China. Fourth, promote technology exports and improve China’s trade in services. In November 2021, the information and communication industry development plan of the 14th five year plan issued by the Ministry of industry and information technology also clearly pointed out the need to build a global information infrastructure and increase overseas cloud computing data centers and CDN nodes. After the official launch of RCEP, it is also more conducive to China’s cloud services to expand overseas market share. At present, Alibaba cloud ranks first in the Asia Pacific market and third in the global public cloud market. Tencent cloud and Huawei cloud also rank among the top ten in the world. Among them, Tencent cloud operates 53 availability zones in 26 geographical regions around the world and deploys more than 100000 server racks. However, according to the global market data in 2020, the overseas market share of Chinese cloud service companies is still small, with a large gap in scale and profit compared with AWS (40.8%) and Microsoft (19.7%), which also shows that China has great potential in the export market of big data and cloud services.
Third, commercial banks have great potential in the project of “counting from the east to the west”. Facing the vast market space, banks can grasp the opportunity of “counting from east to west” from internal to external dimensions. First, promote the digital transformation of banks, strengthen cooperation with excellent big data companies, learn from the scenarios provided by “new infrastructure”, and continuously improve the development process and operation mechanism of Bank science and technology products in combination with 5g, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other technologies, Enhance the market competitiveness of financial data services and strive to launch more products in new fields such as remote banking, Internet of things banking and open banking. Second, improve the research ability of the industry. While the “new infrastructure” brings business opportunities to banks, there are also many uncertain factors. The “new infrastructure” represented by the big data center industry still belongs to a relatively new field for banks. The construction investment is large and the time span is relatively long. It is difficult for banks to understand the enterprise situation in a short time. It is necessary to strengthen the investigation and Research on the “new infrastructure” industry in a forward-looking way, find the highlights of the industry, analyze the risks, and then find the breakthrough cooperation points. The third is to innovate the service mode of project credit. The construction of data center requires a lot of capital investment, but most “new infrastructure” projects are light on assets and lack real estate collateral in the traditional sense, which requires banks to adjust credit strategies and provide different solutions according to different stages of enterprises. In the bidding stage, banks can cooperate with intermediary guarantee companies to provide separate guarantee business for data center construction companies, so as to reduce the capital pressure and cost of bidding enterprises. In the project construction stage, in addition to providing financing services such as traditional loans and bond underwriting, banks can also cooperate with financial institutions such as funds and trusts to develop capital source channels such as industrial equity funds, public REITs, PPP and EOD, optimize credit varieties and reduce concentration risk. In the subsequent operation stage, the bank can target the leading enterprises and listed companies in the subdivided fields, establish contacts with core enterprises and upper and lower supply chain customer groups, sort out the list of target customers, design “1 + n” supply chain financing solutions, implement precision marketing, and expand inclusive financial services. In the mature stage, we can give full play to the advantages of commercial banks’ collectivized comprehensive operation and investment loan linkage, and help enterprises to successfully list with the help of various capital market IPO channels such as the Beijing stock exchange, registration system and Hong Kong spac.
