THE National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) yesterday approved plans to build four mega clusters of data centers in the country’s north and west with the aim of supporting the data needs of Beijing and major coastal centers.

The clusters will be built in the northern Inner Mongolia region, northwestern Ningxia region, Gansu Province and southwestern Guizhou Province, the NDRC said in four separate statements.

The four locations can use their energy and environmental advantages to set up green and low-carbon mega data centers, the country’s top economic planner said.

The move comes as energy-intensive data centers located in China’s east have found it difficult to expand due to limits imposed by local governments on electricity consumption.

Some cities in China’s northern and western regions rich in renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power have already built data centers to serve the economically developed coast.

But their distant locations have brought difficulties to the centers to provide the near-instantaneous retrieval demanded by coastal clients with little tolerance for delays.

Western and northern regions such as Ningxia and Gansu are roughly 1,000 km from the coast.

A marine economy development plan published Dec. 14 encouraged major coastal cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai to relocate high energy-consuming data centers to underwater locations to cut energy used for cooling.

China aims to expand its big data industry into a more than 3 trillion yuan (US$470 billion) sector by 2025 through the building of several clusters of data centers, according to a 2021-2025 plan by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released in November.(SD-Agencies)