Four national departments have approved computing hub nodes in eight regions — Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze Delta, the Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia — with ten national data centre clusters mapped out. China Telecom’s deputy head Liu Guiqing described how the operator reads the project.
Concentrating where demand is
The integrated national data centre system will pull demand and construction conditions toward the eight hubs, so capacity consolidates into the core regions: placement gets more precise, utilisation rises, eastern shortfalls get covered and western resources get used.
Energy is the cost driver. Data centres were classed as high-energy-consumption facilities under November 2021 guidance on strict energy-efficiency constraints — the operator’s own data centres consumed 5.6 billion kWh in 2021, 20% of its total. Aligning the energy grid with the computing grid is expected to bring operating costs down.
The 2+4+31+X layout
The operator runs 794 data centres with 500,000 racks, arranged as two bases, four hotspots, and 31 provinces plus key cities. The two bases — the Inner Mongolia and Guizhou campus parks — hold national storage, backup and offline analysis. The four hotspots carry real-time, high-frequency workloads such as video and e-commerce for dense population centres. The rest cover latency-critical, bandwidth-hungry, mass-connection services: connected vehicles, autonomous driving, drones, industrial internet, AR and VR.
The 2+4 regions already hold 400,000 racks, 80% of the total. Construction on the eight hubs is accelerating, with the target of 85% by the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan — and the east-west ratio moving from 7:3 to 6:4.
The network side
The operator has built a full optical network with ROADM and premium OTN private lines, and has shifted from organising the network by administrative district to organising it around data centres and cloud, with flat, low-latency routing across the four economic regions. Core backbone nodes sit directly in the Inner Mongolia and Guizhou parks, one hop from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Next: raise the network tier of the core-cluster regions, push internet backbone interconnection points to lift cross-network exchange capacity at data centres, build high-bandwidth low-latency direct channels between eastern and western nodes, and interconnect clusters and city data centres inside each hub.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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