"Counting the East and Counting the West" drives more than 100 billion yuan of industries

The western cloud base located in Zhongwei City, Ningxia relies on the foundation of the cloud base and actively promotes the construction of computing power.

Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Wang Peng

The National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other four 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 planned 10 national data center clusters, marking the official launch of the national "East Number West Calculation" project.

Experts believe that it is expected that the "East Counting West" project will drive hundreds of billions of yuan of investment every year, which will have a high pulling effect on related industries, far exceeding large-scale projects such as "South-to-North Water Diversion" and "West-to-East Gas Transmission". However, we must also pay attention to avoiding relevant speculation and blind duplication of construction, focus on the long term, strengthen scientific planning, optimize and improve the layout, and achieve orderly and healthy development of computing power.

Why "East Number" "West Count"

In simple terms, "counting the east and counting the west" is to transfer the data from the east to the west to calculate and process. Why does the mainland start the "counting of the east and counting the west"? Yang Yirui, senior consultant of Zhongcheng Think Tank, said that similar to the resource scheduling logic of national projects such as "South-to-North Water Diversion" and "West-to-East Gas Transmission", the "East Counting west calculation" was launched, one is to optimize the allocation of data computing power resources nationwide in a hierarchical and hierarchical manner to maximize the value of data elements. Second, the data center consumes a lot of electricity, the eastern power consumption index, space resources are tight, while the western renewable energy, clean energy, land resources are abundant, superior climatic conditions can effectively reduce energy consumption, reduce carbon emissions, and maximize environmental benefits.

"This is to optimize the supply structure of the mainland's computing power, and to carry out supply-side reform of the computing power." The use of cheap power energy, communication bandwidth, land resources, etc. in the west will make the cost of computing power lower, so as to more effectively support the development of the mainland's digital economy. At the same time, this can also stimulate the western economy, drive the development of the western digital economy through the construction of hub nodes, and have a pulling effect on related industries and develop high-quality digital industries. Pan Helin, member of the Information and Communication Economy Expert Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, said.

But not all the data is suitable for the West to be processed. Wang Weiling, director of the Data Governance Research Office of the Institute of Informatization and Software Industry of the China Electronics Information Industry Development Research Institute, stressed that the "East Number West Calculation" emphasizes the overall optimization thinking, from the past single body, discrete to the current overall, collaborative direction of change, the data with low latency requirements such as background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup and other cold data, to the western data center; and the data with higher network latency requirements, such as artificial intelligence, video conferencing, etc., are still calculated in the eastern hub to promote the rational layout of the data center. Load balancing between east and west to optimize the supply and demand pattern.

"Counting east and counting west" is just the beginning. As He Baohong, director of the Institute of Cloud Computing and Big Data of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said, through the data flow to drive the flow of funds, talents, technology flow, etc., "East Number West Calculation" will help open up the main artery of the digital industry in the east and west of the mainland, realize the rational layout of a series of ecological resources, digital computing power, digital industry, digital services, etc., and will also inject a steady stream of new momentum into the development of the mainland's digital economy.

Enterprises are scrambling to lay out

"The industrial chain of the data center is long, covering a wide range of categories, the early construction needs a lot of funds, after the release of the 'East Number West Calculation' project, it has triggered a new round of investment in the data center, which is expected to drive hundreds of billions of yuan of investment every year." Wang Weiling said.

Pan and Lin also believe that the "East Counting West" project will drive more than 100 billion yuan of industries, and will also drive the rapid development of surrounding industries such as the communications industry. The related industries of "East Number West Computing" include data center operation and maintenance, data center construction, servers, chips, systems and database-related software, communication facilities, etc., as well as the data circulation industry, data infrastructure industry, and data processing artificial intelligence industry that will develop in the future development of the east.

For this huge market, related companies have been laid out. The reporter learned from the interview that the three major telecom operators have said that they will accelerate the construction of high-grade data centers across the country around the 8 major computing hub nodes of the national "East Number West Calculation", optimize the layout, and build new data centers on demand. Volcano Engine, An enterprise-level technical service platform under ByteDance, is strengthening the training and recruitment of talents in the western data center, as well as the construction of the upstream and downstream industrial chains of the western data center, including the industrial chain and supply chain construction of data center infrastructure, data center related consumables, server spare parts, etc.

JD Cloud has completed the layout of data centers nationwide, with a total of more than 70 data centers, fully radiating the core economic belts such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and Chengdu-Chongqing region, and will also carry out low-carbon energy-saving data center construction based on core hub nodes. Lenovo Group has initially completed the layout of green data center resources in ningxia, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and other western regions, and is working with partners to layout in Beijing, Tianjin, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Jiangsu in the Yangtze River Delta, Zhuhai Hengqin and Shenzhen in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

"Counting from the East to the West" also involves security issues such as cloud data centers, network transmission, remote data storage, computing and access. In this regard, the relevant person in charge of AsiaInfo Security said that in view of the construction and operation needs of the data center, a network security protection system has been formed, and it will actively participate in the construction of the western computing hub node to help the construction of cloud network security and data security in the scenario of "East Number West Calculation".

There are many difficulties to be solved

"East counting and west counting" contains long-term investment opportunities, which will benefit the data center industry chain and effectively promote upstream and downstream investment in the industry. Some capital parties are moved by the wind, borrowing the outlet of "counting the east and counting the west", rubbing hot spots, speculating on concepts, and actively promoting themselves and promoting the rise of stock prices in the case that the business foundation is not enough to support the sharp rise in stock prices.

"'Counting the East and Counting the West' is a long-term project, and to avoid short-term hype, we should focus on the long term." Pan and Lin said.

Yang Yirui believes that the "East Counting West Calculation" project is not only the migration of data computing power, but also the construction of supporting new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers, and the lack of long-term patience does not conform to the law of investment returns of the project.

In fact, there are still many difficulties in promoting the "counting the east and counting the west" project. Wang Weiling analyzed that the structural imbalance between the east and west of the data center, the weak bearing capacity of the western data center industry, and the large risk of cross-regional data transmission security are still prominent. In order to better play the industrial driving role of the "East Numbers and West Calculations" project, it is also necessary to strengthen overall planning in the national top-level design, take multiple measures to promote the coordinated development of the digital economy in the eastern and western regions, and continue to exert efforts in improving the awareness and ability of relevant entities in data security responsibility.

The "East Counting West Calculation" project not only involves data classification and hierarchical guidance, but also integrates local resource endowments, including new energy sources such as wind, water, and solar power generation, as well as the construction of data centers to attract industrial agglomeration. The rational planning, scale and synergy effect of each link will be one of the prerequisites for the realization of the goal of the "East Counting West" project.

Pan and Lin said that the "east number and west calculation" is a supply-side optimization project, with optimization as the mainstay and new additions as a supplement. Data centers place great emphasis on reuse efficiency, and if the reuse rate is low, the cost will be high, so when building a hub center, it is necessary to guide the data demand to the hub. At the same time, the westward shift of computing power is bound to increase the transmission distance, and the construction of the core network should be strengthened.

"We should also pay attention to the market and customer demand-oriented, avoid blindly following the trend of repeated construction, resulting in problems such as 'building a good machine room for basking in the sun', and do a good job in undertaking the eastern business in the field of further segmentation of the data market, building on demand, and accurately docking customer needs." Yang Yirui said. (Economic Daily reporter Huang Xin)