Another super project landed.
Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission, together with a number of departments, issued a notice agreeing to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes in 8 places, including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planned 10 national data center clusters. At this point, the national integrated big data center system has completed the overall layout design, and the "East Number West Calculation" project has been officially launched. Affected by this, the capital market has completely boiled over, and a number of related concept stocks have continued to rise and fall, and "East Number West Calculation" has become a new investment outlet.
What exactly is counting east and west? What's the meaning behind it?
1
From a conceptual point of view, "number" is data, "calculation" refers to computing power, that is, the processing capacity of data; "East number west calculation" is to build a new computing network system integrating data centers, cloud computing and big data, which will guide the eastern computing power demand to the west in an orderly manner, optimize the layout of data center construction, and promote the coordinated linkage of the east and the west. In layman's terms, "counting the east and counting the west" is to develop the data center in the western region, and put the data and needs generated by the economic activities in the eastern region to the western region to calculate and process, which is of great strategic significance for the construction and development of the mainland's economy and society, and belongs to the same series of projects as the south-to-north water diversion, the west-to-east power transmission, and the west-to-east gas transmission, which is enough to highlight the great importance that the decision-making level attaches to the nationwide digital construction.
Why vigorously promote the calculation of east and west? Its roots lie in the objective demands of developing the digital economy.
Looking at the world, the wave of digitalization is the trend of the times and is irreversible, and it is the consensus of everyone to seize the commanding heights of the development of the digital economy and seize the opportunities for industrial change under the new situation. Among them, data has become another key production factor after land, capital, labor, and technology, and computing power plays a new role in the digital age, and computing infrastructure represented by data centers (IDC) and supercomputing centers is becoming an important base for supporting the development of the digital economy. In recent years, with the full penetration of digital technology into various industrial fields, the scale of data generated has become more and more huge, and the demand for computing power in the whole society has become more and more urgent, and the National Development and Reform Commission is expected to grow rapidly at a rate of more than 20% per year, and it is urgent to vigorously promote the construction of computing power infrastructure.
Looking at the present, most of the mainland data centers are distributed in the eastern region, but it should be noted that the data center energy consumption is high, the consumption of electricity and water resources is very large, although the eastern region is economically developed, but the supply pressure on energy, water, land and other aspects is increasing, and the labor cost is relatively high, and the further construction and development of data centers is undoubtedly greatly limited. In contrast, in the western region, various resources are extremely rich, the cost is low, and the land space is vast, and it is fully equipped to undertake the computing power demand in the eastern region and develop the data center, which has formed a strong complementarity with the eastern region.
Because of this, the "East-to-West Calculation" came into being, which is equivalent to optimizing the allocation of digital economy resources nationwide, and then improving the overall computing power level and consolidating the digital economy base, which is similar to the logic of "South-to-North Water Diversion", "West-to-East Power Transmission" and "West-to-East Gas Transmission" that we are familiar with, and all of them are inter-regional resource allocation from the national level.
It is worth noting that according to the approval documents, the "East Counting West Calculation" project has laid out 8 national computing power hub nodes throughout the country. These 8 nodes are divided into two categories, and their positioning is different, and their roles are different.
Specifically:
Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Ningxia belong to the first category, these 4 nodes are distributed in the western region, renewable energy is abundant, the climate is suitable, the data center green development potential is large, its positioning is to continuously improve the quality of computing power services and utilization efficiency, give full play to its resource advantages, consolidate the network and other basic guarantees, and actively undertake nationwide background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup and other non-real-time computing power needs;
Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing Region, Yangtze River Delta Region, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region belongs to the second category, these 4 nodes coincide with the important urban agglomerations of the mainland, which is characterized by a large scale of users, strong application needs, to serve the implementation of major regional development strategies, its positioning is to further coordinate the layout of data centers within and around the city, to achieve large-scale computing power deployment and land, energy, water, electricity and other resources coordinated and sustainable, optimize the data center supply structure, expand the computing power growth space.
These 8 nodes each focus and complement each other, on this basis, 10 national data center clusters are laid out, as a support to promote the orderly transfer of computing power resources to the west, which will help accelerate the solution of the imbalance between supply and demand of computing power in the east and west, and realize the large-scale and intensive development of national computing power.
2
In addition to optimizing the regional computing power pattern and improving the imbalance between supply and demand in data centers, the "East Number West Calculation" project is also expected to empower economic and social development from the following two aspects:
First, promote the economic development of the western region and narrow the regional economic gap.
The data center industry chain is long, involving IT network equipment such as servers and switches, supporting equipment such as heat dissipation and racks, and operators, and the construction of computing power hubs and data center clusters in a large area will inevitably produce a great investment driving effect and effectively promote the investment in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. At present, the economic development of the eastern part of the mainland is quite mature, and the industrial base in the western region is relatively weak, and through the implementation of the project of "counting the numbers in the east and counting the west", it is conducive to expanding the effective investment in the western region, and then driving higher quality growth of the local economy.
Not only that, "East Number West Calculation" can also greatly promote the cross-regional flow of data elements, effectively stimulate the innovation vitality of data elements, accelerate the development process of the digital economy, and constantly spawn new technologies, new formats, and new models, which is an important path to achieve industrial upgrading and balanced regional development, which is equivalent to opening up a new development path for the western region, which can fully integrate data computing power, and further release the multiplier effect of regional cooperation to achieve win-win development in the east and west regions.
Second, it is highly in line with the "double carbon" goal and helps the development of the green economy.
Data centers have always been big consumers of electricity, known as "smokeless steel mills" and "electric tigers". According to "Lighting up the Green Cloud: Research on the Potential of China's Data Center Energy Consumption and Renewable Energy Use" written by North China Electric Power University, the total electricity consumption of mainland data centers in 2018 was about 160.9 billion kWh, accounting for 2.35% of the total electricity consumption of the whole society in the mainland, and the scale even exceeded the total electricity consumption of Shanghai in the same period (156.7 billion kWh); and at the micro level, the power cost of data centers accounted for 56.7% of its operating costs, of which IT equipment and refrigeration systems accounted for the largest proportion of energy consumption. Together, they account for 80% of the total energy consumption of the data center.
At the same time, the carbon emissions of data centers remain high, mainly because the electricity sources of data centers are still dominated by traditional thermal power, accounting for more than 70%, and the proportion of renewable energy use is only more than 20%. Referring to the calculation results of Guohai Securities, if the overall renewable energy use ratio of data centers can be increased to 30% by increasing the consumption of renewable energy on the Internet and data center enterprises are more actively purchasing renewable energy, the carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced by more than 15 million tons.
Under the "double carbon" goal, how to achieve efficient, clean, intensive and circular green development of data centers has become an urgent problem that needs to be solved.
In fact, the National Development and Reform Commission's "Implementation Plan for the National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System Computing Power Hub" released in early 2022 and the "East Number West Calculation" project policy released this time have clearly proposed to increase the proportion of renewable energy used in data centers and encourage them to participate in green electricity trading. The western part of the mainland renewable energy is rich and cheap, such as Inner Mongolia has developed wind power, Ningxia's photovoltaic industry is quite climatic, and most of the western region has a low temperature, increase the tilt of the data center layout in the western region, improve the proportion of green energy consumption in the west, obviously conducive to reducing the energy consumption level of the data center, improving the efficiency of power supply, reducing its electricity costs, and then promoting energy conservation and emission reduction, providing a guarantee for the achievement of the "double carbon" goal on schedule.
Now, with the support of national policies, the implementation of the "Counting East and Counting West" project is expected to reshape the pattern of regional economic development on the mainland and inject new impetus into the higher quality development of the national economy.
3
With the continuous fermentation of the theme of "counting the east and counting the west", the enthusiasm of investors in the capital market has also risen. Although the stock prices of related sectors have recently performed, according to the general prediction of market institutions, the "East Counting West Calculation" may drive the investment scale of 100 billion yuan per year in the next five years. This means that there is a huge room for growth, and behind it is a lot of investment opportunities.
In addition to the data center IDC segment, investors can also focus on the following areas:
First, temperature control equipment.
The energy consumption of the temperature control system is huge, and the key to energy saving and emission reduction lies in reducing the energy consumption of the temperature control system. On the one hand, benefiting from the pull of new data centers, the demand for temperature control equipment will continue to rise; on the other hand, in accordance with the requirements of the "National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System Computing Hub Implementation Plan", encourage the application of innovative liquid cooling solutions such as precision air conditioning and liquid cooling in new machine rooms, and promote the use of energy-saving technology modes such as cabinet modularization in data centers, which will be conducive to the quality upgrade and efficiency optimization of temperature control equipment.
Second, ICT devices/optical modules.
ICT equipment and optical modules are the foundation of computing power networks, and the demand for superimposed computing power in the construction of data center clusters is constantly increasing, which is expected to promote the expansion and upgrading of servers, switches, routers and optical modules.
Taking the optical transceiver as an example, the optical transceiver is an optical device used for high-bandwidth data exchange, and its role is to realize the mutual conversion between the optical signal and the electrical signal, so as to realize the transmission of data. With the upgrading of the network architecture, the frame switch is gradually dismantled into a box switch, and the number of optical modules has also increased, with a new round of demand growth and optical module technology replacement catalyzed, the industry is expected to usher in a new round of value revaluation in 2022.
Third, electrical equipment.
The construction of large data centers requires a large number of high-speed transmission cables and their connection systems. At the same time, due to the rapid iteration speed of data center equipment, periodic equipment updates are required, so the existing data centers also need to continuously purchase supporting cables, components, etc. Driven by the "East Counting West" project, power equipment is expected to continue to benefit.
Fourth, cloud-network integration.
According to the specific requirements of the "Implementation Plan for the Computing Power Hub of the National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System", the data center within the cluster and the urban area is integrated scheduled, supports the development of multi-cloud management services in the fields of public cloud and industry cloud, and strengthens the integrated resource scheduling between multi-cloud, between cloud and data center, and between cloud and network. Therefore, under the trend of cloud-network integration and multi-cloud integration, there may be investment opportunities in related fields.
[Note: The market is risky, investment needs to be cautious. In any event, the information contained in this subscription account or the opinions expressed are for the purpose of exchanging views and do not constitute investment advice to any person. 】
This article was originally created by "Suning Financial Research Institute", and the author is Fu Yifu, a senior researcher of Xingtu Financial Research Institute