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Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments jointly issued documents agreeing to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planning 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.
In the past few days, the concept of eastern numbers and western mathematics has soared, and the interpretation and interpretation of the capital market are dazzling.
However, behind the "liveliness" of the scene, the "doorway" of this national project has little attention.
In fact, the Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of a National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System issued by the National Development and Reform Commission at the end of 2020, as well as the Implementation Plan for the Computing Power Hub of the National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System issued in May of the following year, have clearly described the overall concept and planning principles of "East Counting and West Counting" to the outside world.
In the introduction of relevant people from the National Development and Reform Commission, it is proposed that "like the 'South-to-North Water Diversion' and 'West-to-East Power Transmission', we should give full play to the advantages of the mainland's institutional mechanisms, integrate the layout from a national perspective, optimize the allocation of resources, and improve the efficiency of resource use." Such wording and analogy are enough to show the components of this super project.
In China's semiconductor industry, the East Numbers and West Calculation Project is also of great significance.
Two major opportunities for China Core
In the above-mentioned "Implementation Plan", the east and west data center clusters are given a differentiated positioning in scale and function, "In principle, large and super large data centers will be laid out to areas with relatively rich resources such as renewable energy, and resource guarantees such as networks and energy will be optimized." In the urban area, it leaves room for the development of edge data centers with moderate scale and extremely low latency requirements to ensure the efficient use of urban resources", at the same time, the "Implementation Plan" also clearly states, "promote core technology breakthroughs." Increase the server chip... and other large-scale applications of software and hardware products. ”
These expressions have outlined a clear future evolution trend of China's data center market: the "small and scattered" pattern of the data center market formed by historical reasons will face restructuring, and the computing power will be gathered in the western region in space, and this process of reconstruction will inevitably be accompanied by the concentration of data center operators and market patterns, and third-party manufacturers that do not have the ability to build and operate and maintain large and super large data centers will face tests, and the discourse power of large backbone enterprises represented by the three major operators and head public cloud manufacturers will be further improved. While market resources are concentrated, the tilt support for domestic basic software and hardware such as server chips is also expected to usher in greater strength, which is the first "big opportunity" in the "East Number West Calculation" project in the author's view.
In fact, such an opportunity is no longer "in the future tense."
Since 2020, domestic server chips have begun to be used on a large scale, and in the first batch of PC server collection projects released by China Mobile, the main operator of domestic data centers, in the first batch of PC server collection projects released by China Mobile in 2021-2022, the cumulative number of servers based on Huawei Kunpeng and Haiguang domestic CPU chips has exceeded 49,000 units, accounting for 27% of the overall bidding volume of the batch; the 2021-2022 centralized server procurement project released by China Telecom in the same period. G series domestic chip server plans to purchase 53,401 units, accounting for more than 25%, doubling the procurement volume in 2020.
(Picture from the official website of Jiuxiao Kunpeng Company)
In Gansu, one of the hubs of the eastern and western regions, public information shows that Huawei has also reached a strategic cooperation agreement with the local government to jointly promote the ecological construction of Kunpeng server chip-related industries.
Another "big opportunity" in China's semiconductor industry is the possibility of "lane change overtaking" of new categories of data center chips, which was previously published in Jiwei Network in the "[Core View] Coveting Data Center "Fat Meat" How is the trend of domestic and foreign chip manufacturers attacking and defending? In the article, the application prospects and industrial patterns of the two emerging data center chips of GPUs and DPUs have been carefully sorted out.
While reconstructing the geospatial space of the data center, the computing power of the data center will also show the characteristics of "replacing the small with the big", that is, the small and medium-sized computer rooms with backward technology in the eastern region will be vacated and replaced by the large and super large centers of the western cluster. With the expansion of the cluster scale, operators will inevitably have a greater "pain" for the "computing power tax" problem of data center network and storage consumption of computing resources, providing market demand for innovative solutions at the protocol layer, device layer, board level and even on-chip level. In addition, Alibaba Cloud, the largest public cloud vendor in China, in addition to the Arm architecture server CPU to achieve large-scale applications within it, recently its research and development agency Dharma Academy, also exhibited the "memory and computing integration" chip prototype, which is not inferior to many overseas giants in chip product innovation.
(The picture is from Alibaba Cloud public account)
Chip "domestic big cycle"
There is also a more far-reaching significance for China's semiconductor industry, that is, the further "connection" between the domestic IT industry and IT consumption.
Over the years of analysis of the "Chinese core" sweat cattle, "ecology" is a frequently mentioned keyword, Chinese manufacturers, often facing the market overseas giants to build a solid "ecological" barriers, in the weak product force - no market - no revenue - no resources to iterate product force vicious circle, even if there are stages of national special funds or subsidies support, but it is still difficult to form a sustained internal vitality.
According to the estimation of consulting firm Gartner, global IT spending is expected to reach $3.9 trillion in 2021, while China's IT expenditure is expected to be 3.09 trillion yuan in the same period, accounting for less than one-eighth, which is significantly lower than the proportion of mainland GDP in the world.
Even if it is such a limited IT consumption, Chinese companies often prefer to invest in overseas big brands, which in addition to the channels or "ecological" advantages of overseas manufacturers, but also related to the decision-making mechanism of micro institutions, for enterprise procurement personnel, "with the flow" is a safe approach, maverick procurement of domestic hardware, once there is a bad experience in use, it may bring themselves inexplicable "trouble", this stereotype in the mind of the user, is also an important factor restricting the scale of application of chips and other domestic semiconductor products.
The implementation of the East Counting Project is also a baptism of digital transformation of Chinese enterprises, domestic IT expenditure from the traditional enterprise computer room software and hardware procurement, migration to data center cloud services, the procurement decision-makers of basic software and hardware products, from the end enterprise users, into more cloud service operators, as mentioned above, these have more resources, but also easier for the national will to touch the market main body, whether it is internal development or external procurement, will be including semiconductors including the domestic pan-IT industry, Bring more durable and larger market demand, thereby changing the "decoupling" of the domestic IT industry from IT consumption.
In this sense, the significance of the eastern number and the western calculation is comparable to the science and technology innovation board, if the latter is the main symbol of the domestic "closed loop" of the capital market, and has built a stable mechanism at the capital level for the domestic substitution of the semiconductor industry, then the former will help the opening of the "domestic cycle" of the consumer market, and truly bring the "source living water" of market-oriented survival for China Core. (Proofreader/Rakukawa)