China News Service, Beijing, April 13 (Reporter Pang Wuji) Speeding up the construction of new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers has recently become a hot word for China's economic development. As a general supporting technology in the fields of Internet, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, what opportunities and challenges does China's data center development face? What is the gap with the international advanced level?

Great potential

Huang Wei, chairman and CEO of domestic high-performance data center operator and service provider Wan Guo Data, recently said in an interview with a reporter from China News that China ’s data center currently ranks second in the world, but only one tenth of the United States One. From the perspective of development time, there is still a gap of 6 to 8 years with the United States.

From the perspective of demand, North America's demand for data centers is currently the largest, followed by Europe, Asia is rising, and the fastest growth rate in the world.

Under the impact of the new coronary pneumonia epidemic, the development potential of the digital economy is prominent. From the central to the local, various deployment and support policies to create a new engine for the digital economy are frequently introduced, and the "new infrastructure" is being accelerated.

A research report released by Kezhi Consulting recently showed that during the epidemic prevention and control period, the government and enterprises and institutions used a large number of measures such as scientific and technological epidemic prevention, remote office, remote education, e-commerce life, etc., which fostered a large number of emerging customer needs, driving Chinese Internet data The scale of customer demand in the IDC industry has increased significantly. The report predicts that by 2022, China's IDC business market will exceed 320.05 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.8%, entering a new round of outbreaks.

According to Wu Hequan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the IDC market in China will exceed 1 trillion yuan in 2020-2025.

Huang Wei pointed out that in the past two years, China's data centers have begun to develop their own technologies, and continue to develop innovations that adapt to the Chinese environment. But overall, the United States is going faster. However, with the advent of the 5G era, China's data center companies may be more innovative.

Regional supply and demand imbalance

Despite the huge potential for development, Huang Wei pointed out that the demand for data centers in China shows a hot spot of "hot in the east and cold in the west", and there is a certain structural imbalance between supply and demand.

Huang Wei said that in the past ten years, data centers across the country have not been built. The two numerical ratios of total construction and total demand are roughly balanced. But at present there is a very obvious phenomenon: in economically developed areas, demand exceeds supply, and in areas with underdeveloped economy, supply exceeds demand.

Over the past decade, a large number of data centers have been built in western regions such as Chongqing, Chengdu, Guizhou, and Inner Mongolia. "At that time, the main consideration was that the resource conditions in the west were better, such as lower electricity costs and suitable natural climate," Huang Wei said. However, insufficient consideration has been given to supply and demand, and the utilization rate of these data centers is not very high.

Huang Wei explained that in different application scenarios, the requirements for data delay are often different. For example: Automated driving has high requirements for delay, and data transmission comes back and forth. After calculation, it comes back and forth. If the problem of delay cannot be solved, it will cause safety problems. Because many application scenarios have very high latency requirements, the data center that stores this data must be deployed closer to the application scenario. (Finish)