The heat brought by the project of “counting from the east to the west” is sweeping the relevant enterprises in the industrial chain.
Recently, 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 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. 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.
According to the evaluation of industry insiders, based on the scale that the construction of a data center is a 10 billion level investment, the “counting from the east to the west” project will be a trillion level investment. It is another major regional coordinated development strategic project launched by the state after the “South-to-North Water Transfer” project, “west to East power transmission” project and “west to East Gas Transmission” project. It is a typical representative of new infrastructure. According to China Central Television News, during the 14th Five Year Plan period, the construction of the country’s eight major computing power hub nodes will add no less than 400 billion yuan of relevant investment every year.
The stock market took the lead in responding to the news of the launch of the “counting East and counting West” project. Since February 18, a number of “counting East and counting West” concept stocks have been hotly speculated, and the share price of some stocks fell after they got rid of their relationship with the “counting East and counting West” project. In the view of the brokerage research team, the industrial chain related to the “East digital West computing” project is long, involving enterprises in the fields of servers, IDC operators, optical modules, power systems, temperature control systems, cloud computing and so on.
Then, how do the enterprises related to the “counting from the east to the west” project view the impact of this project? How will they participate in the construction of this project
“counting from the east to the west” boom
According to Wang Yingbo, a doctor of economics from the Information Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, who studies the digital economy, although he can’t infer the specific measures of the “counting from the east to the west” project in advance, he is not surprised that the state will regulate the development of the digital industry.
“The development of digital economy, including the development of data centers, has a strong path dependence. If there is no first mover advantage, it is very difficult for latecomers to catch up and surpass. It is very important to develop digital economy with the help of national forces.” Wang Yingbo told our reporter that he believes that in the development of digital economy, the government will play the role of policy guidance, resource integration and even public service providers.
In practice, with the penetration of digital technology into all walks of life, especially the landing of 5g and other technologies, computing power has become an important support for the development of the national economy. The evaluation report of 2020 global computing power index jointly released by IDC and Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) shows that for every point increase in the computing power index, the digital economy and GDP will grow by 3.3 ‰ and 1.8 ‰ respectively.
According to the data of the national development and Reform Commission, at present, the scale of China’s data centers has reached 5 million standard racks, and the demand for computing power in the whole society is still very urgent. It is expected to grow at a rate of 20% per year in the future. Most of China’s data centers are located in the East. Due to the increasing shortage of land, energy and other resources, it is difficult to continue to develop data centers on a large scale in the East, The western region of China is rich in renewable energy and has the potential to develop data centers and undertake the demand for computing power in the East. The plan of “counting from the East and computing from the west” was brewing.
In the view of some business people, the upsurge of “counting from the east to the west” since mid February this year can be regarded as the second wave of heat of the national integrated planning data center. The first wave of heat is in May 2021, when the national development and Reform Commission, the central network information office The implementation plan for the computing hub of the collaborative innovation system of the national integrated big data center (hereinafter referred to as the “computing hub implementation plan”) issued by the Ministry of industry and information technology and the national energy administration clearly mentioned the need to strengthen the overall planning and standardized management of the data center and carry out policy coordination in data center, network, land, energy, water, electricity and other aspects, Promote the rational layout and orderly development of data centers nationwide; Promote the green and sustainable development of the data center, reduce the energy consumption of the data center, and increase the integrated scheduling of infrastructure resources.
The above implementation plan made it clear to build national hub nodes of the national integrated computing network and develop data center clusters in 8 places, but the specific number of data center clusters had not been determined at that time. In the near future, the number of data center clusters and the positioning of data centers in the East and West have become clear: on the one hand, accelerate the layout of data centers to the west, and take the lead in transferring businesses with low network requirements, such as background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup, to the west, which will be undertaken by the western data center; On the other hand, for businesses with high network requirements, such as industrial Internet, financial securities, disaster early warning, telemedicine, video call, artificial intelligence, etc., they can be arranged in Eastern hubs such as Beijing Tianjin Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao and Dawan district to promote the transfer of data centers from first tier cities to the surrounding areas within the hub.
According to Zhong Yuanhe, vice president of Tencent cloud and general manager of Tencent IDC Platform Department, the launch of the “counting from the east to the west” project, The most important significance and the most obvious impact on the industry is policy guidance: “if there is no guidance, enterprises mainly make decisions according to the market conditions. The reason for its decision may be that there is demand here or the electricity here is very cheap, which is easy to be disorderly and not conducive to the effective allocation of resources.”
Tencent, Alibaba, byte beating, meituan and other large Internet enterprises are important forces in China’s self built data centers. At present, Tencent’s data centers are mostly located in the East, mainly because of the large demand for computing power in the East, and the nearby deployment can reduce the network delay and data transmission cost. Telecom operators are also major owners of data centers. Liu Guiqing, deputy general manager of China Telecom Corporation Limited(601728) Group Co., Ltd., disclosed to the media that the ratio of the company’s data centers in the East and West is 7:3, and will be adjusted to 6:4 in the future.
In a media interview on February 23, Zhong Yuanhe affirmed the benefits of the “counting from the east to the west” project. First, it can make better use of the rich renewable energy in the west, so that users in the East can enjoy the dividend of Western energy. Second, it can reduce the energy consumption of the data center, reduce the operation cost of the data center to a certain extent, and is also conducive to the realization of the national dual carbon goal.
Zhong Yuanhe provided a set of data to our reporter: Generally speaking, the energy cost of a data center will account for about 40% to 50% of the total cost and 70% to 80% of the operating cost from the beginning of construction to its service retirement.
The energy consumption of data center is a key problem in the industry. Although some regions in China require the pue value of data centers (PUE = total energy consumption of data centers / energy consumption of IT equipment, the closer it is to 1, the better the energy efficiency level) to be lower than 1.25, the research report data of Guorong securities shows that at present, only about 40% of data centers in China can have pue lower than 1.4 According to the data of the national development and Reform Commission, the annual power consumption of China’s data centers accounts for about 2% of the total power consumption of the whole society, and the power consumption of data centers is still growing rapidly.
It is easier to strengthen the monitoring of the energy consumption of the data center by implementing the project of “counting from the east to the west”. The implementation plan points out that the data center cluster will be allocated with unified energy consumption indicators from the provincial, regional and municipal levels, and the allocation of energy consumption indicators through energy use right trading is encouraged; Explore and carry out inter provincial energy consumption and benefit sharing cooperation; Encourage the data center to strive to achieve the goal of incentive consumption responsibility on the basis of completing the minimum consumption responsibility weight.
participation and concerns
According to the system layout of the national integrated big data center, eight national computing hub nodes will serve as the backbone connection points of the computing network, develop data center clusters, carry out the collaborative construction between the data center and the network, cloud computing and big data, and serve as the strategic fulcrum of the national “Eastern digital Western computing” project to promote the orderly transfer of computing resources to the West, Promote the solution of the imbalance between supply and demand of computing power in the East and the West.
In addition, one to two data center clusters are planned to be set up in each computing hub. Around 8 National Computing hub nodes, 10 national data center clusters are Zhangjiakou cluster, Yangtze River Delta eco green integrated development demonstration zone cluster, Wuhu cluster, Shaoguan cluster, Tianfu cluster, Chongqing cluster, Gui’an cluster, helingel cluster, Qingyang cluster and Zhongwei cluster.
From our reporter’s interview, relevant enterprises have stated that they will actively participate in the construction of the “counting from the east to the west” project.
Huawei cloud introduced to our reporter that Huawei cloud has arranged three core data centers in Beijing Tianjin Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Bay area, and two cloud data centers in Gui’an and Ulanqab. The arranged data center is more consistent with the eight major computing hub nodes planned by the state, and can be said to be one of the participants in the national integrated big data center. At present, 80% of the data related to Huawei’s own office, R & D and production business is concentrated in the two data centers of Gui’an and Ulanqab. As a public cloud provider, Huawei cloud is also leading customers to relocate data to the two data centers of Gui’an and Ulanqab, providing solutions such as cloud, cloud storage, cloud mobile phone and cloud rendering for large enterprises, attracting film and television production, automobile Corporate customers with high consumption of computing resources such as home furnishings and biomedicine give priority to the green and low-carbon western data center.
Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) (000977, SZ) is mainly engaged in the R & D, production and sales of cloud computing infrastructure products such as servers. According to the latest data of Gartner, in the first quarter of 2021, the global market share of Inspur general server reached 10.2%, ranking the third in the world; In the Chinese market, Inspur general server market accounts for 31.5%. According to the latest data from IDC, in 2020, Inspur’s AI server market share ranked first in the world. Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) in response to investors’ questions on the interactive exchange of Shenzhen Stock Exchange, it said that it would actively participate in the “East data and West computing” project, provide advanced computing power support and support the construction of green data center. Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) introduced its past customer cases to our reporter to show its ability reserve in building green data center and Intelligent Computing Center.
Tencent cloud introduced to our reporter that Tencent cloud has deployed multiple data centers in Guizhou hub, Beijing Tianjin Hebei hub, Yangtze River Delta hub and Chengdu Chongqing hub.
However, for enterprises, how will the data centers deployed earlier and not on the nodes of the eight national computing hubs be handled? Zhong Yuanhe responded to this. Our reporter said that the life cycle of the data center itself is relatively long. For the built data center, it is not necessary to abandon it. If abandonment is a waste of resources. With the deepening of industrial digitization, the investment and construction of data centers will continue, and the newly-built data centers will follow the policy guidance of “counting East and counting West” to the greatest extent.
In Wang Yingbo’s view, the government will not force the relocation of existing data centers. For the location of new data centers in the future, it is not suitable to use mandatory administrative means to intervene in enterprise decision-making. The more feasible way is to use administrative power to pry market regulation, such as land supply, power supply and other means, The cost of building a data center in one place is lower than that in other places, so as to attract the agglomeration of data centers.
Although “counting from the east to the west” has broad prospects, the implementation of this project will not be achieved overnight. “Just as there will be some preparatory work for moving to a new place, so will the construction of a data center. To go to a new place, you may need to take different operation measures according to the local environment, and you will also focus on supporting facilities, such as whether the network supporting facilities and power supporting facilities are perfect, and whether the enterprise can recruit people quickly.” Zhong Yuanhe told our reporter.
Some industry insiders believe that the planned 8 National Computing hub nodes and 10 data center clusters can be completed in the next three to five years, which is already a great speed. In the interview, there was feedback from enterprises that the attractiveness of data center clusters to the company has a great relationship with the local business environment and the perfection of supporting facilities. Some people in the industry believe that autonomy may be one of the concerns of enterprises choosing to join the data center cluster.
Wang Yingbo believes that in the process of implementing the “counting from the east to the west” project, the government should find its own positioning, be a good provider and operator of public services, do not interfere with the micro operation of enterprises, and do not undermine market competition.
