Perspective East counting West counting| why "East Number" should be "West Counting"?

Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments recently jointly issued a document 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. How will "Counting East and Counting West" open a new chapter in the computing power network? The communication world focuses on this topic, invites industry experts to express their views, and we look at the "East Counting West" together.

As Mr. Li Zhengmao, general manager of China Telecom, pointed out, the current era of computing power has entered. For example, animal power in the agricultural era and electricity in the industrial age, computing power is the core productivity factor of the digital age. Mr. Li Zhengmao proposed the three laws of computing power, which is simply put: computing power is productivity, computing power doubles every 12 months, and computing power drives GDP growth. In today's digital transformation of China's entire society, there is no doubt that the demand for computing power has become a core productivity factor like the demand for electricity.

China has also announced carbon peak and carbon neutrality targets, that is, carbon dioxide emissions strive to peak in 2030 and strive to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. According to the statistics of the World Resources Institute, China's carbon emissions mainly come from the fields of electricity, construction, industrial production, transportation, agriculture and other fields, of which: energy and electricity account for the largest proportion, about 40%; followed by the construction field, accounting for more than 20%; industrial production, transportation, agriculture accounted for 5% to 10% each. Unfortunately, the production of computing power is actually maintained by the consumption of electricity. In addition, the production and construction of computing infrastructure (hardware equipment) will also occupy the carbon emissions of industrial production, construction, and transportation. In contrast, of course, the environmental impact of electricity consumption accounts for the highest proportion of carbon emissions generated by computing power. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the IDC industry in the United States will consume about 139 billion kWh of electricity in 2020. At present, the global data center industry consumes a total of 3% of the world's electricity production and generates 200 million tons of carbon dioxide. In the context of the rapid development of the digital economy, the electricity consumed by computing power and the carbon emissions brought by it will account for an objective proportion of the overall emissions. This is also a problem to consider in the development of the digital economy.

In first-tier cities, the biggest bottleneck in getting approval to build an IDC is now the energy consumption index. When a large amount of computing power and storage want to migrate to the west, it is equivalent to alleviating the energy consumption index. This energy consumption has also been migrated to areas where energy is cheap and production is green.

Therefore, The contradiction between the computing power growth needs of the digital transformation of the whole society and the dual carbon goal of energy conservation and emission reduction is fully taken into account, laying the foundation for the sustainable development of China's digital economy. It has three significant strategic objectives:

Three significant strategic objectives:

Take advantage of regional geographical advantages to increase the proportion of renewable energy in the production of computing power;

Fully consider the differences in the distribution of computing power demand between the east and the west, and break through the bottleneck of computing power in developed regions to obtain policy support;

Attracting digital industries that rely on high computing power to the west;

First of all, the eastern and western calculations are the use of regional advantages to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction strategies.

The eight national hashrate hub nodes include Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia. Around these 8 nodes, 10 national data center clusters are planned. A large number of data center construction projects will be carried out at these 10 points.

Among them, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area are world-class urban agglomerations that will be built during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. It is also an important regional battlefield for the digital economy. The digital economy has three directions: industry digitalization (industry/agriculture/commerce), social management digitalization (government affairs/urban management/public safety, and other fields), and life digitalization (finance/retail/travel, and other life services). It can be seen that the denser the population, the more developed the digital economy, and the higher the demand for computing power. These three regions must be supported by a strong local computing infrastructure.

The Chengdu-Chongqing and Yunnan-Guizhou regions are particularly rich in water resources in China, with developed hydropower and cheap energy prices. At the same time, the cool weather in Guizhou is conducive to the heat dissipation of IDC equipment and is also relatively energy-saving. It is indeed conducive to the development of the IDC industry, which is a high-energy industry.

Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Ningxia are rich in light resources and wind energy resources, and are major renewable energy provinces。 At the same time, there are long winters, and the summer climate is not particularly hot, which is also conducive to heat dissipation. However, due to the wide distribution of new energy and the large variation of power generation, it is difficult to stably transmit local power to the east.

We have been deploying West-to-East power transmission. However, the transmission of high-voltage electricity, compared to the transmission of signals, is not an order of magnitude in terms of energy consumption. Many industries and businesses could not move west to electricity-rich provinces. The commercial and living power-consuming facilities in first-tier cities can only use west-to-east power transmission. However, a part of the hash rate can indeed be moved.

Secondly, this plan also fully considers the different types of hashrate demand, opening a policy window for the hash rate that must remain in the local area. The separate planning of computing power hubs in the three major urban agglomerations ensures this demand.

Many applications place high demands on low latency. Extreme examples, such as future high-level autonomous driving and V2X applications, will rely heavily on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-network device communication and computation. Much of the hash power must be deployed outside the vehicle. These reactions must be applied in minutes and minutes, and it is impossible to use the computing power thousands of miles away. As we all know, the fastest signal transmission can not break through the limit of the speed of light. Long-distance hash rate calls can only be used for applications that do not require synchronization. In the planning, for a long time, the west still focused on cold data storage with low latency, and a large number of hot data that needed to be calculated quickly and with high concurrency were placed in the east. The three major urban circles have also determined the status of the hub of computing power, ensuring the need for rapid growth in demand for developed computing power.

At the same time, this plan may also bring opportunities for industrial upgrading to guizhou, Ningxia and Gansu, which are economically backward provinces. A large number of industries with high demand for computing power are likely to enter the local area.

Some IT industries that have a high dependence on computing power and storage may retain the research and development and production centers in developed cities because of the gap in the market price of computing power, and put the support capacity of computing and storage in these western computing hubs. Deploy simple maintenance personnel locally or even rely entirely on the services of cloud operators. This is also possible. For example, the rendering work required for film and television special effects production has this possibility. This is equivalent to an industrial transfer. Some of the high-energy, low-manpower jobs in the high-tech industry have been transferred to areas with green and cheap energy. That is, to increase the energy level of the local industry, but also to reduce emissions, it is really a double win.

This plan is a guiding plan. The "South-to-North Water Diversion Project" and the "West-to-East Power Transmission" are state-invested projects and public services. "Counting east and counting west" depends on the market, and the computing power will be sold to enterprises through market behavior. Therefore, production costs, computing power pricing, hashrate sales channels, etc. have yet to be tested by market development. The government has released a map of the development of the industry, and the various cloud network operators are the players who will finally realize the blueprint. We will wait and see soon a digital China with green, low-carbon, super computing power.

End

Author: Nomura Soken Tao Xujun

Editor-in-Charge/Layout: Fan Fan

Review: Shen Qing

Producer: Liu Qicheng

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