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The
clusters will be built in the northern Inner Mongolia region,
northwestern Ningxia region, Gansu province and southwestern
Guizhou province, the National Development and Reform Commission
said in four separate statements.
The four locations can use their energy and environmental
advantages to set up green and low-carbon mega data centres, the
state planner said.
The move comes as energy-hungry data centres located in China's
east have found it difficult to expand due to limits imposed by
local governments on electricity consumption.
Some cities in China's northern and western regions rich in
renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power have
already built data centres to serve the economically developed
coast.
But their distant locations have meant the centres have
struggled to provide the near-instantaneous retrieval demanded
by coastal clients with little tolerance for delays.
It is unclear how China would turn western and northern regions
such as Ningxia and Gansu, which are 1,000 km (600 miles) from
the coast, into actively operating centres of computing power
given the data latency caused by the huge distances to data
users in the east.
A marine economy development plan published on Dec. 14
encouraged major coastal cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen and
Zhuhai to relocate high energy-consuming data centres to
underwater locations to cut energy used for cooling.
China aims to expand its big data industry into a more than 3
trillion yuan ($470 billion) sector by 2025 through the building
of several clusters of data centres, according to a 2021-2025
plan by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
released in November.
($1 = 6.3714 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Liangping Gao, Albee Zhang and Ryan Woo; Editing
by Richard Pullin)
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