Global Times recently reported that computing power, like water and electricity, has become a necessity in our lives. China is accelerating its integration into all fields of the economy and society. The processes of implementing real-life application scenarios such as smart manufacturing, smart city, smart medical care, and driverless cars, are all inseparable from the support of massive computing power. Computing power has gradually become a new engine for digital economic growth. Last February, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the National Energy Administration officially launched the national “East Data West Compute” program which consists of eight National Computing Power Hub Nodes in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and in the Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou regions, and in the planned ten National Data Center Clusters. The “East Data West Compute” program guides the intensive computing power demand from the east to the west in an orderly manner. It also enables the cross-region flow of data elements and it also promotes the rapid development of the digital economy and the artificial intelligence industry with a national integrated computing power network. Recently, the Shanghai Data Center has started dividing high volume business data and distributed non-realtime computing loads to the Inner Mongolia Computing Hub, which has the advantages of a low electricity price and natural low temperature cooling. The program promotes an east-west balanced resource structure of domestic data centers to establish a clustered, integrated layout from a national perspective to improve efficiency.
Source: Global Times, February 16, 2023