Perspective east and west counting| Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei node will become the "bellwether"

With the full launch of the national "East Counting West Counting" project, computing power has become the core productive force of digital China and information society, which is directly related to the development speed of the digital economy. Communications World All Media specially planned to enter the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei node of the eight nodes of "East Number West Calculation", comprehensively display the development status of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei data center and computing power industry, and explore how Beijing-Tianjin Wing injects new momentum into high-quality economic development.

This article was first published in The World of Communications

Issue 6, March 25, 2022 Issue 892 in total

Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Cyberspace Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the National Energy Administration jointly replied to the letter agreeing to start the construction of national integrated computing power network national 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 planning 10 national data center clusters. At this point, the national integrated big data center system has completed the overall planning layout, and the "East Counting West Calculation" project has been officially launched.

The "number" in "Counting East and Counting West" refers to the data, and "counting" refers to the computing power, that is, the ability to process the data. The realization of the "East Counting West Calculation" project is inseparable from the data center and computing power. Up to now, the scale of continental data centers has reached 5 million standard racks, and the computing power has reached 130EFLOPS (1.3 trillion floating-point operations per second).

According to the "Data Center Industry Atlas Research Report" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology in January 2022, data center enterprises have large-scale layouts in first-tier cities. According to the data of China's data center big platform, the data centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou account for about 26% of the national share; the data center industrial belt in the first-tier cities has gradually formed, such as the Beijing Internet data center cluster composed of Zhangbei, Langfang, Huailai and Yanjiao in the northern region; the data center cabinet resources in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region rank in the forefront of the country's major urban agglomerations, of which Beijing is the city with the largest number of operating cabinets in China.

Overflowing from Beijing to around Beijing

Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordinated development

IDC (Internet Data Center) is a key component of the data center, according to the Statistics of the Internet Society of China, from the perspective of geographical distribution, in the list of the top 100 Internet companies in 2020, more than 80% of the enterprises are from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta region, of which, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has the most selected enterprises, reaching 39. As the region with the richest network resources in the mainland, Beijing and its surrounding areas carry the IDC business needs of a large number of Internet enterprises. "The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is the largest region in China's IDC market, accounting for more than 1/3 of the total size of China's IDC market." According to the "New Infrastructure Development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Data Center" released by the Data Center Committee of the China Communications Industry Association.

As the core of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Beijing has always been a hot city for data center construction. However, due to the shortage of land and power resources in Beijing and the strict requirements for environmental protection, the Beijing Municipal Government has strengthened the control of new data centers, in addition to clear restrictions on the construction area, but also strengthened the requirements for data center energy consumption levels, so in recent years, there are fewer new data center projects in Beijing.

With the proposal of "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality" and the promotion of the integration process of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the distribution of data centers has undergone a development process from urban areas to suburbs, from Beijing overflow to Beijing, and the IDC demand generated in Beijing will gradually be undertaken by the surrounding areas. In recent years, Wuqing District of Tianjin, Langfang of Hebei Province, Huailai and other adjacent beijing areas, seizing the opportunity of rapid development of the data center industry, vigorously developing data center construction, in terms of resources and capabilities have the conditions to undertake the demand for Beijing spillover data center, and gradually formed a pattern of integrated development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regional data center.

According to the "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Data Center New Infrastructure Development", Tianjin is adjacent to Beijing, with superior location advantages and rich customer resources for the development of data center industry, and many IDC companies have begun to transfer to Tianjin and Hebei regions. With good network, transportation and location advantages, Tianjin has attracted many third-party IDC service providers to land data center projects, and has formed data center clusters such as Binhai New Area, Wuqing District and Beichen District, of which Wuqing District has obvious transportation advantages due to its proximity to Tongzhou District of Beijing, attracting many enterprises such as CICC Data, Guofu Rui, Jinshan Cloud and so on.

Langfang City, Hebei Province, and Yanjiao Town, which is under its jurisdiction, are geographically close to the core area of Beijing, and have obvious advantages in land and power supply, and are an important bearing area for IDC overflow demand in Beijing. In addition, data centers are high-energy industries, and regional climatic conditions have a greater impact on the construction and operating costs of data centers. Zhangbei County and Huailai County in Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province, have superior natural conditions and abundant power resources, and actively plan data center industrial parks, giving preferential electricity prices to settled data center projects, attracting Alibaba, Qinhuai Data and other enterprises to settle in data center industrial parks.

The industrial environment is good

Major enterprises have laid out

The reply document of the four departments pointed out that the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei hub plans to set up a Zhangjiakou national data center cluster, the boundary of the starting area is Huailai County, Zhangbei County and Xuanhua District of Zhangjiakou City, and the main task is to actively undertake the real-time computing power demand in Beijing and other places, guide the migration of warm and cold business to the west, and build a real-time computing power center that radiates North China, Northeast China and even the whole country.

Zhangjiakou continues to promote the construction of data centers, and currently has signed 39 big data industry projects in the city, with a planned investment of 137.7 billion yuan. At present, 12 data centers such as Alibaba Zhangbei Xiaoertai and Tencent Huailaiyun have been put into operation, with 1.03 million servers in operation; 11 data centers such as Heying Data are accelerating construction; and projects such as China Telecom Data Center are promoting preliminary work.

Before the "East Number West Calculation" project was proposed, Zhangjiakou issued the "China Digital Dam Zhangjiakou Big Data Industry Development Plan (2019-2025)" put forward the overall goal of industrial development of "by 2025, the scale of big data servers will reach 5 million units, with a carrying capacity of tens of millions of units, and the investment scale of big data and related industries will exceed 200 billion yuan"; the development layout of "one belt, three districts and multiple parks" has been re-established; and the development path of three-stage implementation has been proposed.

In the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei hub, major enterprises such as Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, and China Telecom have laid out one after another. For example, Alibaba Cloud Zhangbei Data Center was put into operation in September 2016, vigorously using green energy sources such as wind power and photovoltaics, and deploying the largest immersion liquid cooling cluster in domestic cloud computing data centers. Tencent Cloud has deployed two data centers in Huailai Ruibei and East Park, with plans to accommodate more than 300,000 servers, both of which have been partially put into production. Through the large-scale use of liquid cooling, heat recovery and other technologies, the Jingdong Yunlangfang data center uses high-temperature water systems to cool the CPU, achieving a total carbon emission reduction of more than 10%; the annual operation of PUE is less than 1.1, the infrastructure energy consumption is saved by 30%, and a clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient energy system is built. Since Qinhuai Data entered Zhangjiakou in 2017, it has rapidly laid out a new generation of ultra-large-scale computing infrastructure clusters that are in line with the development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei in stages. As early as 2020, China Telecom clarified the "2+4+31+X" data center/cloud layout, of which "2" refers to Inner Mongolia and Guizhou, "4" refers to Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and Shaanxi, Sichuan and Chongqing, and the data centers deployed in the "2+4" region reach about 77% of the total scale.

Driven by the active layout of well-known enterprises such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Qinhuai Data, a number of typical enterprises and parks with exemplary roles have emerged in Zhangjiakou. Zhangbei cloud computing base and Huailai data center base were rated as national new industrialization industry demonstration bases.

Overall hash rate development

At the leading level

With the comprehensive and continuous penetration of digital technology into all fields of economy and society, the demand for computing power in the whole society is very urgent, and it is expected to grow rapidly at a rate of more than 20% per year. According to the White Paper on China's Computing Power Development Index released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology in September 2021, the pace of computing power development across the country has accelerated, and the overall computing power development in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and other regions is at a leading level. Overall, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and neighboring provinces have a higher computing power development index, of which Beijing seizes the opportunity of computing power development, accelerates the layout of the computing power industry and the construction of computing power infrastructure, creates a good environment for the development of computing power, and actively promotes the wide application of computing power, and the computing power development index reaches more than 40, ranking at the forefront. The hashrate environmental index of the four major urban agglomerations of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and Chengdu-Chongqing Twin Cities Economic Circle is relatively high. In terms of total volume, beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai ranked among the top three in terms of computing power in 2020, all exceeding 15EFLOPS. From the statistics, it can be seen that Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei is leading in the field of computing power.

From the perspective of different dimensions of computing power, Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai rank in the top three in the scale of basic computing power and intelligent computing power in the mainland, and the scale of computing power leads the country, accounting for 62% of the total in the country; in terms of supersurfacing power, Jiangsu, Beijing and Sichuan rank in the top three in the scale of continental supersurgical computing, Beijing has taken the lead in realizing supercomputing cloud service in the country, and the mainland has made great progress in the field of supercomputers.

Computing power provides strong support for the digital transformation of the industry. From the perspective of the industry, the Internet is still the largest computing power demand industry, accounting for nearly 50% of the overall computing power, the Internet giants represented by Ali, Tencent, Baidu, AndteDance have a more urgent demand for computing power, and the centralized deployment of computing power also makes the Internet industry a representative of advanced productivity.

The computing power infrastructure represented by the data center has developed tremendously with the economic and social informatization, and together with the communication network infrastructure, it constitutes a new generation of information infrastructure, which has contributed important forces to promoting the construction of a network power and digital China, and provided important support for industrial production, social and people's livelihood and other fields. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei node will become the "bellwether" of the "east counting west" project construction.

End

Author: Diao Xingling

Editor-in-Charge/Layout: Fan Fan

Review: Shen Qing

Producer: Liu Qicheng

I knew you were "watching"