The competitive landscape is changing, and upgrading power facilities has become a key bottleneck
On a global scale, artificial intelligence is reshaping the economic and industrial landscape, becoming the core driving force behind the expansion of global data centers. The growth rate of power demand in data centers is rapidly catching up with traditional industries, becoming a key variable that cannot be ignored in the transformation of the energy system.
The Chinese data center industry mainly faces four key issues in energy transformation, “Wang Jianlei analyzed to a reporter from China Industry News.
Firstly, upgrading the power infrastructure has become a crucial step. The International Energy Agency has proposed that if the existing power infrastructure is not upgraded in a timely manner, about 20% of data center planning projects may face construction delays. Therefore, we have been actively participating in the construction of China’s power grid, including the application and cooperation of key technologies such as high-voltage direct current (HVDC), to help enhance cross regional transmission capacity and system resilience.
Secondly, obtaining green electricity is difficult. Although the national strategy of “counting from the east and computing from the west” has promoted the layout of computing power towards renewable energy rich areas in the west, the distribution of regional green electricity is uneven, the peak shaving capacity of local power grids is limited, and the utilization rate of green electricity in data centers is not high. Improving cross regional transportation capacity is the key to solving this problem.
Thirdly, energy efficiency improvement is also an important issue, involving the spatial pressure brought by high computing power density and the insufficient supply of stable low-carbon energy. With the higher requirements for computing density, sustained operation time, and power consumption in artificial intelligence computing tasks, the upgrade of computing infrastructure requires an integrated design of space power heat dissipation management, promoting the development of power supply equipment towards miniaturization, high energy efficiency, and modularity. In addition, data centers operate under high loads for a long time, which requires extremely high requirements for power stability and continuity. At the same time, they also need to take into account the constantly improving green power. Therefore, large-scale battery energy storage systems must be deployed on the load side to undertake functions such as peak shaving, voltage stabilization, and emergency support, which will further increase the complexity of the overall system.
Fourthly, with the country listing data centers as a key area for energy conservation and carbon reduction, and setting clear phased goals, operators are accelerating technological upgrades and operational model transformations to better respond to policy requirements. For example, by 2025, the proportion of green electricity in newly built data centers will exceed 80%, and the energy utilization efficiency (PUE) will be reduced to within 1.25.
The rapid development of low-carbon energy is expected to reshape the competitive landscape of the data center industry. Regarding this, Wang Jianlei stated that this is mainly reflected in three aspects: the increase in technological barriers, the intensification of regional differentiation, and the innovation of business models.
Low carbon energy drive requires data centers to have green power supply, multi energy complementarity, zero carbon power supply equipment, intelligent scheduling, and carbon management capabilities. Traditional single power supply models will gradually be phased out, and enterprises with full lifecycle energy solution capabilities will be in line with development trends.
The renewable energy rich areas in the western region (such as Ningxia and Inner Mongolia) can attract high energy consuming data centers to gather due to the cost advantage of green electricity; The eastern region improves power supply reliability through technologies such as microgrids and energy storage, forming differentiated competition.
The data center is transforming from an “energy consumption center” to a “producer consumer”, creating new sources of income and innovating business models through value-added services such as waste heat utilization, green power trading, and carbon asset development.
The Chinese data center industry is facing new development opportunities, mainly reflected in the rapidly growing market prospects, technological innovation driven energy efficiency upgrades, and expansion of the green electricity trading market. Siemens Energy will work together with green electricity suppliers, carbon trading institutions, and other upstream and downstream industries to create a low-carbon data center ecosystem, participate in the formulation of national green data center standards, and promote the standardized development of the industry, “said Wang Jianlei
