The Chinese central government has unveiled plans to develop a slew of mega data centre clusters in the country’s inland western provinces, in order to best leverage their renewable energy resources.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently announced that it had approved the development of four mega data centre clusters in the province-level administrative units of Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu and Guizhou.
According to NDRC the clusters will help to support the data needs of major eastern cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where the development of energy-intensive data centres has been curbed by power consumption restrictions imposed by local government.
NDRC said that environmental conditions of the inland provinces will foster the development of green and low-carbon mega data centres, given the presence of abundant renewable energy resources.
China plans to expand the scale of its big data sector to 3 trillion yuan by 2025 and complete the development of several data centre clusters, according to a five year plan released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) in November.
