China to Build Four Mega Data Centre Clusters

China plans to develop four mega clusters of data centres in the country's north and west have been approved, to serve the data needs of Beijing and important coastal cities. The clusters will be erected in the northern Inner Mongolia region, north western Ningxia region, Gansu province, and south-western Guizhou province. According to the state planner, the four areas can take advantage of their energy and environmental advantages to build green and low-carbon mega data centres. The move comes as energy-hungry data centres in China's east have struggled to develop due to local governments' restrictions on electricity consumption. Some cities in northern and western China, which have abundant renewable energy resources such as wind and solar electricity, have already constructed data centres to serve the economically developed coast. However, because of their remote locations, the centres have struggled to offer the near-instantaneous retrieval required by coastal clientele who have little patience for delays. Given the data latency created by the vast distances between data users in the east, it is unclear how China will turn western and northern regions such as Ningxia and Gansu, which are 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) from the coast, into actively running computing power centres. A marine economy development plan released on December 14 pushed key coastal cities including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai to transfer high-energy-consuming data centres to underwater locations to reduce cooling energy use. According to a 2021-2025 plan announced in November by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China plans to grow its big data industry to more than 3 trillion yuan ($470 billion) by 2025 by constructing multiple clusters of data centres.