In China there is a nationwide scramble for data centers, with some major cities losing out to towns and counties for new investments. Despite their different approaches to developing and deploying artificial intelligence, one aspect is common across China and the United States: data and computing centers are proliferating in both countries, especially in remote locations. While the U.S. is seeing residents and localities fight back against plans for data centers in their backyards, regional officials in China are embracing them. In China there is a nationwide scramble for such facilities and some experts are concerned that an overzealous data center race may lead to overbuilt infrastructure.
In Shatian, a small coastal town in Dongguan city in Guangdong province, municipal authorities in July announced an aggressive plan to invest CNY100 billion to build a 9,000-acre data and computing park on a barren island, with scheduled completion by 2030. In Zhejiang province, the little-known county of Jiashan bordering Shanghai has opened the first phase of a CNY5 billion data center with a capacity of 15,000 petaflops per second, a unit equivalent to 1 quadrillion calculations. When fully completed, the total capacity will double. The data center, designed for training next-generation AI models as well as molecular and drug development, would process data faster than traditional supercomputers in the U.S. Jiashan county already hosts Alibaba Group Holding’s Yangtze River Delta Intelligent Computing Base and a computing center operated by China Telecom.
“Previously, computing power clusters of this scale would only be found in top-tier cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen. Now, Jiashan has a growing cluster of them,” Zhejiang Daily quoted local officials as saying. Yangzhou in Jiangsu province has also broken ground on a hyperscale data park costing CNY60 billion and boasting a projected capacity of 30,000 petaflops, with the backing of investors including Tencent Holdings and China Telecom. Similar facilities of varying scale are also sprouting up in central and western regions like Hunan and Xinjiang. In Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, a CNY30 billion computing center is taking shape. However, Tang Dajie, Senior Researcher at the China Enterprise Institute think tank, warned of “irrational” investments in the sector. “AI is on everyone’s lips, so a headlong rush into related projects is almost inevitable. Local governments, driven by performance targets, often exhibit irrationality,” Tang said. He pointed to the stark contrast seen in the U.S., where some state governments and residents are pushing back on data centers in their towns, the South China Morning Post reports.
