China’s “East Data West” computing project is apparently in full swing, with $6.1 billion already invested on eight datacenters across the nation, which aims to complete the project by 2025.
The project was announced in February 2022 with the aim to complete eight national computing hubs and 10 national datacenter clusters to move more compute resources to China’s western regions processing the data generated in the east.
It is part of a greater group of projects looking to improve the country’s computing capacity and speed, hoping to double computing power by 50% before 2025, and the latest announcement shows work is well underway, with a total rack size exceeding 1.95 million racks an increase from 1.46 million in March 2024, and a utilization rate of 63%, an increase of 4% since 2022.
East Data West Computing
The figures were revealed by Liu Liehong, director of the National Data Bureau, at a speech in the recent 2024 Big Data Expo.
Liu also disclosed network latency between eastern and western hub nodes has met the 20 millisecond requirements and the power utilization efficiency (PUE) of newly built datacenters is as low as 1.04 in contrast to a global average of around 1.5 PUE.
China’s push for IT dominance has come around the same time as the US placed additional restrictions on tech in China including restrictions on the export of chips and the import of tech made in China to the US and its allies.
Recent technological advances such as AI may have a profound impact on daily lives and politics so world superpowers are determined to try and stay one step ahead of each other in the tech race with the advancement of datacenters and network infrastructure leading the way.
