"New infrastructure Construction" has become an important notion in China. It summarises the government’s focus on development in seven key areas: 5G, Ultra High Voltage, data centres, artificial intelligence, electric vehicle charging points, industrial Internet and rail transport, with lots of sub-sectors involved.
In March 2020, the Chinese central government stressed the need to "accelerate the construction of 5G networks, data centres and other infrastructure" linking it to the investment needed in public health services.
The construction of data centres has become a significant part of the "New Infrastructure Construction" policy. Consequently, local governments at all levels, such as Guangxi, Jiangsu, Beijing, Zhejiang and other provinces, have launched plans to advance the construction of data centres.
Guangxi provincial government proposed to build over 60 large data supporting platforms, with the carrying capacity of data centres reaching 500,000 standard racks. The provincial government of Jiangsu encouraged construction of supporting power supply infrastructure for the new projects of a supercomputer centre, large-scale data centre and cloud computing centre. The Beijing government put emphasis on the “green” retrofit of existing data centres and encouraged the transformation of existing small data centres from low efficiency to high efficiency. The Zhejiang provincial government laid out plans to build 25 large and hyper scale cloud data centres by 2022, with a total number of servers reaching some 3 million units.
Simultaneously, Chinese internet giants are also accelerating their plans to construct further data centres. For instance, Tencent announced a plan to deploy more than one million servers in May 2020. Alibaba expects to add more than one million servers and will build more than 10 hyper scale data centers across the country starting from July 2020.
In general, “New Infrastructure Construction” policy will keep Chinese data centre market buoyant in coming years. This boom will have a positive result on all the adjacent markets, including energy generation, cooling, and cabling market. The structured cabling market is also expected to benefit from this trend. It is expected to maintain a CAGR of 5%-10% in the next five years.