China pursues a nationwide initiative to market excess data center computing power; latency and heterogeneous hardware pose significant challenges.
China is addressing the issue of excess capacity in data centers by creating a national, state-run cloud platform that sells unused computing power. This platform aims to centrally connect data centers across the country, managing their idle capacities through unified organization, orchestration, and scheduling.
The government plans to standardize interconnections of public computing power across the country by 2028, enabling effective redistributions of surplus compute resources on a national scale.
Key elements of this approach include:
- Centralized National Cloud Platform: Linking data centers nationwide to a single system for selling and utilizing wasted compute power.
- Standardized Interconnection: By 2028, public computing resources will be interconnected nationwide to facilitate seamless sharing and scheduling.
- Government Regulation: The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is curbing excessive new data center projects, banning certain local government-backed small projects and imposing closer scrutiny on developments from March 2020.
- Collaboration with Telecoms: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) works with China’s three state-owned telecom companies (China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom) to build this platform.
Currently, data center utilization in China is estimated at only 20-30%, reflecting significant overcapacity due to rapid local government-backed growth and initiatives like the “Eastern Data, Western Computing” plan, which misaligned geographic placement with demand. This underutilization represents wasted capital and energy. Optimizing existing resource use aligns with China’s environmental goals, including carbon neutrality by 2060.
The national cloud network also aims to improve economic efficiency, technological readiness for AI and big data, and more balanced regional resource distribution, avoiding duplicated efforts by overlapping provincial initiatives.
In summary, China’s proposed solution is a centralized national cloud network that orchestrates and sells unused compute power from overbuilt data centers, improving utilization, reducing waste, and supporting sustainable digital infrastructure growth.
Technology plays a significant role in China's national, state-run cloud platform, as the centralized network employs advanced data-and-cloud computing to sell and utilize wasted computing power. The government's plan to standardize interconnections of public computing power across the country by 2028 is a testament to the integration of technology within the framework of this solution.
