Sun Huifeng: He is currently the president of CCID Consulting Co., Ltd., a special expert of the Operation Monitoring Coordination Bureau of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, deputy secretary-general of China Computer Industry Association, a special expert of the Management Advisory Committee of China Entrepreneurs Association, and an adjunct professor of Beijing Jiaotong University.
The new infrastructure construction refers to the infrastructure construction focused on science and technology, which mainly includes seven major fields, such as 5G infrastructure, UHV, intercity high-speed railway and intercity rail transit, new energy vehicle charging piles, big data center, artificial intelligence and industrial Internet. The construction of new infrastructure is mainly manifested in digitalization and intelligence, and its core is to provide the underlying support for the development of intelligent economy and the digital transformation of industry.
1. Why are big data centers shortlisted for new infrastructure?
1, the underlying infrastructure of intelligent economy
With the surge of digitalization, our production, life and everything are being defined by numbers. Everyone, everything, every transaction and every activity can be labeled with specific numbers, and even our thinking can be transformed into digital information to be expressed. Twenty years ago, the growth rate of data was only about 100GB per day, but now, the growth rate of data has reached about 5TB per second. There is no data, no data, no calculation, no data without truth. The data explosion and data value generated by digital application will inevitably bring demand for information infrastructure. The scale and quality of information infrastructure construction will directly determine the speed and height of economic development in the current digital economy era. It can be said that developing information infrastructure is the general trend and the inevitable path.
2. The inevitable trend of industrial digital transformation.
Digital economy has become the main line of global economic development. The key to the development of digital economy is to promote the penetration of digital technology in various industries, give birth to new industries, new models and new formats, and release the vitality of industrial economy. Industry digitalization not only has higher requirements for the ability of perception, transmission, storage and processing of data and information, but also includes the increasing demand for digital platforms, big data platforms and cloud infrastructure platforms, and it also needs to build a digital ecology of the whole value chain. All means of realization cannot be achieved without the support of information infrastructure, without calculation and transformation. The inherent requirements of industry digitalization and intelligent transformation need to be promoted by developing information infrastructure.
3. The concentrated expression of the new connotation of national competitiveness.
Computing power is the concentrated expression of a country’s future competitiveness. From new materials and new energy development to high-end equipment simulation design, biological genes, intelligent transportation, emergency security and many other fields, scientific and technological innovation needs "computing power" as the foundation; Similarly, the development of the new economy requires the integration of new technologies such as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence with the real economy, the reconstruction of industrial ecology, and the birth of new models and contents. The power behind it is also the development of information infrastructure and the landing of new technology application scenarios. The outbreak of this epidemic has spawned a series of new formats and models, including online training, online prevention and control, distance education and telemedicine. It also shows that the combination of "cloud and digital" is an important force supporting business model innovation. Computing power is power. Enterprises or countries with super computing power will have the opportunity to integrate industrial resources, build industrial ecology and cultivate competitive advantages. Therefore, they will have the supreme power to dominate the distribution of industrial value.
Second, the global and domestic development of big data centers
1. The construction of digital economy has entered a large-scale implementation period, and the investment in data centers has increased steadily.
Next-generation information technologies, such as cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, have developed rapidly, and data has exploded, so the construction of data centers has become the general trend. Major countries and enterprises in the world have started the road of digital transformation. Driven by this upsurge, IT investment in global data centers has shown a rapid growth trend. The growth rate of IT investment in data centers around the world and China is higher than that of global GDP (2.3%) and China GDP (6.1%).
2. The Asia-Pacific market is still the highlight of the global data center market, with the fastest investment growth.
From the perspective of global data center construction and development, the IT investment scale of data centers in the world’s top three data center markets-the United States, Japan and Europe still accounts for more than 60% of the global data center IT investment scale. The United States maintains its market leadership position and leads the global data center market in terms of data center products, technologies and standards. The Asia-Pacific market is still the highlight of the global data center market, with an increase of 12.3% compared with the same period in 2018, and the IT investment scale of data centers reached 75.17 billion US dollars. The main driving force still comes from the steady development of the data center market in China, the deepening of applications such as mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, and the acceleration of the construction of industrial Internet in internet plus.
3. The number of data centers has slowed down, and the proportion of large data centers has increased year by year.
According to the connotation of the concept of data center and the industry’s unified understanding of the characteristics of data center, CCID Consulting defines a data center as a place that is built according to unified standards and provides a stable and reliable operating environment for centralized IT application systems with computing power, storage capacity and information interaction capability. Data centers can be divided into enterprise data centers (EDC) and Internet data centers (IDC) according to the service objects. An enterprise data center refers to a data center built and owned by an enterprise or institution to serve its own business. Internet data center is owned by IDC service provider and provides paid information services to customers through the Internet. At the same time, we also give the definition of data center type according to the rack size.
In 2019, there are about 74,000 data centers in China, accounting for about 23% of the total data centers in the world, with 2.27 million data center racks and 2,213 IDC data centers in use. The trend of large-scale and large-scale data centers continues, and regional applications and multi-level group enterprises tend to avoid blind construction and repeated investment through large-scale construction. In 2019, the number of super-large and large data centers reached 12.7%, and 320 data centers were planned to be built, accounting for 36.1%. Compared with the United States, there is still a big gap in this data. American super-large data centers have accounted for 40% of the global total, and there is still much room for development of large data centers.
Third, the future growth potential and driving factors
1. Data resources have become a key factor of production and a "new energy" for the development of digital economy.
With the rapid development of Internet, everything is digitized, and the amount of data and calculation explodes exponentially. According to CCID Consulting’s data, by 2030, the original data production industry will account for 15% of the total economic output, and the total data in China will exceed 4YB, accounting for 30% of the global data. Data resources have become key production factors, and more industries extract valuable information by using structured or unstructured data resources such as Internet of Things, industrial Internet and e-commerce. The processing and analysis of massive data requires the construction of a big data center.
2. Scenario applications such as AI, 5G and blockchain have opened up new growth space for the development of data centers.
With the joint promotion of national policies and capital, the AI ecology has been continuously improved, and the application of AI scenarios has been accelerated. AI infrastructure services will usher in a new era of rapid development. The commercialization of 5G is just around the corner, and a large number of applications based on 5G have begun to be demonstrated and promoted in traditional industries such as finance, manufacturing, medical care, and retail. The application requirements such as VR/AR, autonomous driving, high-definition video, intelligent transportation, and intelligent medical care will also open up room for the development of data center market and the innovation of service model. At the end of 2019, the government listed the development of blockchain technology as the key direction of national strategy for the first time. In the future, the application scenarios of blockchain technology will extend from the current economic fields such as cross-border transactions, commodity traceability, financial innovation and supply chain integration to social policies and public services such as people’s livelihood needs, urban governance and government services, which will inevitably bring a large number of distributed computing, distributed storage and distributed database management needs, which are inseparable from the support of big data centers.
3. The demand for industrial computing is strong, which will become a new driving force for the development of data centers in the future.
As a product of the deep integration of the new generation of information technology and manufacturing industry, the industrial Internet has increasingly become the key support of the new industrial revolution. China has a huge application market of informationization, digitization and intelligence, and the informationization transformation, digitization and intelligent upgrade of traditional industries. In the future, the pace of enterprises going to the cloud and equipment will accelerate, and the demand for industrial computing will increase explosively. Moreover, the state attaches great importance to the development of the industrial Internet. In March 2019, the industrial Internet was written into the government work report for the first time, proposing to focus on promoting the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry, building an industrial Internet platform, expanding "smart+"and empowering the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. The deployment and development of industrial Internet applications and the demand for industrial computing services will become a new driving force for the development of data centers in the future.
