Gui'an pioneers in sustainable development of data centers

As one of the national data center clusters planned under the "channeling computing resources from the east to the west" project, the data center cluster in Gui'an New Area, Southwest China's Guizhou province, leverages local environmental advantages such as a cool climate, abundant energy resources, and stable geological conditions to attract a total of 20 data (smart computing) centers, giving it among the highest number of large and super-large data centers of any region in the world.

To date, Gui'an has deployed 95,800 smart computing chips, with a computing power scale reaching 30.7 EFLOPS, accounting for 13.3 percent of China's total computing power as of the end of 2023. This scale is equivalent to the computing power output of over 60 million laptop computers.

Gui'an's data center cluster has been looking to coordinate industrial development with environmental protection, forging a green, energy-saving, and low-carbon development path.

To enhance the efficiency of computing resources, the Gui'an Supercomputing Center has been expanding businesses in film and television areas, supporting over 100 film and television works including The Wandering Earth 2, Deep Sea, and Three-Body with rendering capabilities.

It is also exploring applications in scientific research computing, new industrialization, new energy, logistics and transportation, and meteorological analysis. Since it began operating at the end of 2020, the Gui'an Supercomputing Center has maintained an average utilization rate exceeding 80 percent.

With the successive establishment of a batch of super-large data centers, the scale of Gui'an's data centers continues to expand, necessitating a transition toward greener data centers.

In August 2022, the "Gui'an New Area green data center planning and construction guidelines (trial)" were officially released, providing guidelines for rack density, energy utilization efficiency, building, and structure to guide the planning, construction, and management of new and expanded green data centers.

Gui'an Industrial Development Holding Co has constructed China's first cave-style data center, leveraging cave and mountain characteristics and employing design techniques such as cold and hot aisle separation to achieve energy efficiency indicators at an internationally advanced level.

The Huawei Cloud Gui'an Data Center integrates green and smart technologies into its overall design. Once operating at full capacity, it is expected to lead to annual electricity savings of 1.01 billion kilowatt-hours and reduce carbon emissions by over 800,000 metric tons.

Gui'an New Area currently has four data centers approved as national-level green data centers, and as of 2023, the green economy accounted for 42.9 percent of the new area's economy.