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China announces billion-dollar investment in data center. Megaproject promises to usher in a new era of supercomputing, putting the US on alert.
Amid US restrictions on technology exports, China has taken a decisive step toward leading the next era of supercomputing. Last Thursday (29), a senior government official announced a colossal investment of more than 43,5 billion yuan (equivalent to US $ 6,12 billion) in a national megaproject to build a state-of-the-art data center.
This strategic initiative aims to strengthen the country's technological infrastructure, placing China at the forefront of the world and increasing tensions with the US.
Understand the objective of China's megaproject
Liu Liehong, head of China's National Data Bureau, released the figure, updated to the end of June, at an industry conference in the southwestern city of Guiyang, the state news agency reported. Xinhua.
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Beijing officially launched the data center initiative, dubbed Data East, Computing West, in early 2022 as part of President Xi Jinping's push to build a Digital China.
O China's investment in data center megaproject comes as the country faces increasing restrictions from the United States, which limited exports of some advanced computing products, including those from the segment leader, NVIDIA, in recent years. In response, China has been ramping up efforts to develop its own advanced computing capabilities.
China's mega data center project includes plans to build eight large data centers, mainly located in western regions. The strategy aims to utilize the abundant energy resources in the west and transfer computing capacity to economic centers along the coast.
Over 200 billion yuan in investment
In addition to direct government spending on the data center, Beijing has also sought to attract other types of investment, including private capital.
The eight data centers in China's megaproject have attracted more than 200 billion yuan in total investment, according to Liu. He added that the project has installed more than 1,95 million server racks, with about 63 percent of them currently in use.
Launched in 2022, China's megaproject has seen the construction of eight national computing hubs progressing at full steam. In addition, China also has plans to have 10 national data center clusters as part of the project.
Highlighting the steady progress of the mega data center project, Liu says that the network latency between the eastern and western hubs generally meets the requirement of 20 milliseconds (ms), while the power usage effectiveness of newly established data centers has been reduced to 1,04. The computing power demand in the east is being met in the west, and the effects of computing power aggregation have begun to emerge, Liu added.
China plans to form preliminary system in 2025
As computing power represents a new quality productive force in the digital economy era, Liu said China will encourage cities to pilot various technical routes in the next two to three years to find the best solution for building the national data infrastructure.
China aims to form a preliminary comprehensive computing power infrastructure system by the end of 2025.
The China International Big Data Expo 2025 is currently being held in Guiyang and ended on Friday. The event attracted more than 21 guests and saw the participation of 414 domestic and international companies. Participants at the event included domestic industry leaders such as Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.com, as well as 77 overseas companies from more than 30 countries and regions including the United States, Germany and Canada.
