Key investment points
Event: 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 documents, agreeing to start the construction of national computing framework nodes in 8 places, including Beijing Tianjin wing, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Bay area, 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.
Computing power is the core productivity of digital economy. Optimizing supply and green development should be considered simultaneously. Up to now, the scale of China’s data center has reached 5 million standard racks, and the computing power has reached 130 eflops (130 billion floating-point operations per second). With the comprehensive and continuous penetration of digital technology into all economic and social fields, the demand for computing power in the whole society is still very keen, and it is expected to grow rapidly at a rate of more than 20% every year. The cluster planned by “counting from the east to the west” will carry the construction of large and super large data centers in the computing capacity frame. For the construction of the starting area of each cluster, the state has established specific development goals: the average shelf rate of the data center is not less than 65%, the pue of the data centers in Beijing Tianjin wing, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao and Chengdu Chongqing frame is controlled within 1.25, and the rest of the board is controlled below 1.2. According to the statistics of CDCC, the average shelf rate of China’s data centers in 2021 was 50.07%. Except for more than 65% in East China, South China and North China, most of the other regions were less than 40%, and the structure of computing power resources was uneven; The average pue is 1.49. Only North China, East China and Northeast China are lower than the average level. There is still a lot of room for improvement. Driven by the new infrastructure and carbon neutralization, the green energy-saving trend of the data center will push up the demand for temperature control.
The orderly transfer of computing resources is expected to ease the supply side competition. Due to the strong dependence on the network, the data center is mainly located in first tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, where the network nodes are generally concentrated. However, the large-scale construction of the data center is subject to factors such as tight energy consumption indicators and high power cost in the eastern region, as well as the bottleneck of small network bandwidth and high inter provincial data transmission fees in the western region, The national deployment of “counting from the east to the west” is the top-level design of reconstructing the network pattern around the data center. At the same time, the state guides the orderly transfer of computing resources to the west, so as to solve the shortage in the East and the surplus in the West. The western data center is positioned to undertake the computing power needs of the eastern region. In particular, non real-time warm and cold businesses such as background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup will be the first to transfer to the west, while core businesses with high real-time requirements such as industrial Internet, financial securities, disaster early warning, telemedicine, video call and artificial intelligence reasoning will be arranged in the eastern frame. Enterprises that provide or use computing power are expected to enjoy the cost reduction dividend brought by operators’ increasing network bandwidth and network transmission investment to the west, so as to alleviate the vicious competition caused by the price war.
Server volume recovers, and cloud manufacturers’ capital expenditure is expected to continue to increase. The shipments of BMC chips and x86 chips are the top indicators of server demand. The monthly revenue of Xinyi, the leading manufacturer of BMC chips, and the shipments of Intel data center business both rebounded year-on-year in 2103. At the same time, the capital expenditure of cloud giants at home and abroad recovered, and Alibaba cloud 2103 recovered. Through the handover and verification, it can be seen that the marginal recovery of server demand and the industrial prosperity are expected to continue to rise.
Investment suggestion: as another important strategic project of the country, the “counting from the east to the west” plays an important long-term driving role in the development of data center industry and brings incremental demand for civil engineering, it equipment manufacturing, basic software, green energy supply and other fields. It is suggested to pay attention to IDC manufacturers with existing layout in the western region Leading temperature control and energy-saving solution provider and server supplier
Risk warning: the project promotion is lower than expected; Server demand is less than expected; Intensified industry competition, etc
