31 data centers settle in 'Grassland Cloud Valley'

Ulaanqab possesses not only the magnificent grassland scenery, but also a futuristic new title: "Grassland Cloud Valley".

Ulaanqab has attracted the settlement of 31 data centers, including the Huawei Cloud Data Center, creating the largest Huawei computing power hub cluster in northern China.

The location selection for a large data center is an extremely stringent decision, with multiple criteria to consider, such as climate, transportation, and energy requirements. Ulaanqab, however, happens to meet all the demands.

For instance, data centers have a large number of servers, and heat dissipation is a critical issue. The international evaluation standard is power usage effectiveness (PUE), which represents the ratio of all energy consumed by the data center to the energy consumed by IT loads. The closer the ratio is to 1, the better the energy efficiency is.

Most excellent data centers have a PUE of around 1.8, while in Ulaanqab, the PUE can be maintained at below 1.26 throughout the year.

The reason for this lies in the fact that Ulaanqab has an average annual temperature of only 4.3 C. With cool summers and windy springs and autumns, it can achieve full heat dissipation.

Furthermore, Ulaanqab's geographical location is unique. It is located in Inner Mongolia, but is close to the computing power application markets of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

Ulaanqab's greatest resource is its wind and light. "Wind" refers to wind energy, with an effective wind field area accounting for one-tenth of the country and one-third of Inner Mongolia.

"Light" refers to solar energy, with an annual sunshine duration of 3,200 hours, making it the second-highest total radiation zone in the northwest region, after the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Currently, the installed capacity of clean energy in the local area is 8 million kilowatts, accounting for 50 percent of the region's total installed capacity.

Elsewhere, the significant aggregation effect of data centers in Ulaanqab is evident. A total of 31 data center projects have been signed and settled in the region, with a total investment of 85.8 billion yuan ($11.75 billion) and a contracted server scale of 4.47 million units.

The computing power scale of more than 10 operational projects in Ulaanqab, including Alibaba, Apple, and Kuaishou, has reached 14,000P, with intelligent computing power accounting for over 70 percent.