Designing Temples for Data in China
The design of data centers and the construction of a "digital China"
In contemporary China, cloud computing centers have become more than prosaic warehouses for servers powering internet searches or storing data. Increasingly, data centers, often called jisuan zhongxin, or “computing centers” are designed as iconic representations of high-tech progress, both for China’s national ambitions to develop into a leader in digital computing, as well as showpieces for particular cities and local leaders showing that they are earnestly implementing Xi’s "digital China" vision
In the hot dry sun of Hebei, the shallow reflecting pool glistens in front of the Xiong’an Cloud Supercomputing Center, a low-lying plinth-like rectangular slab covered in cream-colored granite housing the computers and servers that will power the city’s digital infrastructure. I recognized it instantly from the renders I had seen of the project online, which depicted the building floating almost like a mirage above the glassy water, a temple to the city’s data. In Xiong’an, and in other cities in China, cloud data centers are increasingly designed not merely as functional repositories of servers, but as icons of technological progress and futurity. The data center has become the new incarnation of the chenghuang miao or “city god temples” in Imperial China, which housed deities that were thought to protect cities and ensure their prosperity. Today, the new god of urban development is digital data, which must be housed in shimmering homes designed to cool energy intensive servers and showcase their role in building a “digital China” and a keji qiangguo or, “technologically strong nation.”
Xiong’an
Nicknamed as the “Xiong’an City Brain”, the structure was billed in media reports as the “first ever data center to incorporate ecological energy saving features.” The city brain was opened on November 14, 2022 by Xiong’an Digital City Company, a subsidiary of Xiong’an Group, the government-owned corporation responsible for building much of the city’s infrastructure, with joint-investment from China Telecom. Consultants from Alibaba and Tsinghua University also worked on the project. The Party Secretary of the company refers to the structure as an:
“important carrier of Xiong’an digital twin city’s operations and service.”
The building will house computing platforms that power “four systems in one”, including an Internet of things (IoT) platform, city information management (CIM) platform, a platform of live-video camera feeds from the city. A digital twin of Xiong’an has been built alongside the city’s physical construction. The digital platform powering the city integrates building information management and geographic information systems, along with dynamic data from sensors and cameras around the city, the so-called internet of things.
Buried deep within the structure are 3600 server bays, which will “satisfy Xiong’an Digital twin city’s demand for computing power by 2035, when the city is to reach the first milestone of development. Burying the servers underground mitigates servers’ overheating and reduces energy usage, purportedly making the center one of the first to achieve a low PUE (power useage effectiveness) ratio below 11. The green roof of the building folds down to the ground and back towards the Yuerong Park behind it, one of the first parks in Xiong’an to open. Described as “the core of the ecological city, a perfect integration of digital and ecological” and the “first data center built into the earth, with Chinese landscaping features,” the data center has both practical and symbolic functions: powering the city’s digital systems while also communicating a sublime fusion of high technology, ecology, and Chinese landscaping traditions.
In contemporary China, cloud computing centers have become more than prosaic warehouses for servers powering internet searches or storing data. Increasingly, data centers, often called jisuan zhongxin, or “computing centers” are designed as iconic representations of high-tech progress, both for China’s national ambitions to develop into a leader in digital computing, as well as showcases for specific cities.
When I first saw renders of Xiong’an’s “City Brain”, I was struck by its religious-like grandeur. Cloud computing servers are often relegated to the desolate exurban peripheries of urban areas worldwide, the largely hidden infrastructure powering the digital connectivity we rely on—our instantaneous online purchases, our life’s photos, our deepest most personal data alongside heaps of useless content we generate every day. But the Xiong’an City Brain was placed prominently fronting a major public square as the digital nerve center of a city, just adjacent to the Xiong’an Commercial Service Center which was the first large-scale development to be completed in Xiong’an New Area. Xiong’an is being developed as a satellite city 100 km south of Beijing, intended to relocate offices and headquarter sof state-owned enterprises out of the capital. Xi Jinping himself has championed the project, calling it a “legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren,” and a “thousand-year project of national significance.” The Xiong’an data center is but one manifestation of an emerging ethos of design in China that merges ecological, technological, and cultural symbolism.
Chengdu
In the southwestern city of Chengdu, a shimmering complex featuring a transparent glass cube housing supercomputers anchors the Tianfu New Area. Completed in 2020 and designed by the state-owned Southwest Design Institute, the Chengdu Supercomputing Center is yet another celebration of cloud computing through design that elevates otherwise mundane computer server centers into icons of technological and urban progress. According to a description of the project, “Data rooms of traditional computing centers are precision areas not typically open to the public; but the [silicon cube] allows “people to visit along the glass corridor and experience the shocking scale of one of the world’s ten most powerful supercomputers.”. A standalone cube covered in glass houses the “supercomputer”, which is set apart from the main structure housing power generation and operations. The cube floats above a round reflecting pool surrounded by curving pedestrian ramps that wend through the complex allowing the public to view the structure.2
Xi'an Future Artificial Intelligence Computing Center
According to official reports, the largest computing center in Northwest China being built in Xi’an will create:
“four ecological platforms (public computing power service platform, scientific and technological innovation and talent training platform, application innovation incubation platform, and industry aggregation development platform) to support the opening of the closed loop of "government-industry-academy-research-application".3
Building a Digital China 数字中国建设
Data centers have become symbolic objects of technological progress in Xi’s China. Some observers noted that this vision was partially inspired by Xi’s own efforts as Party Secretary of Fujian to build a “Digital Fujian” as early as 2001. This mainly involved digitalization of government services and building telecom infrastructure into rural areas. As an article in Guangming Daily writes,
“From Digital Fujian to Digital China, General Secretary Xi Jinping’s strategic thinking on building an informatized China is consistent, comes from the same source, and is highly related ideologically and conceptually”4
In 2023, a “Plan for the Overall Construction of a Digital China” was released, which called for:
“Opening up the main arteries of digital infrastructure. Accelerate the coordinated construction of 5G networks and gigabit optical networks, further promote the large-scale deployment and application of IPv6, promote the comprehensive development of the mobile Internet of Things, and vigorously promote the application of Beidou at scale. Systematically optimize the layout of computing power infrastructure; promote the efficiency, complementarity, and coordination of computing power between the east and the west [of China]; and guide the rational and phased layout of general-use data centers, supercomputing centers, intelligent computing centers, edge data centers, etc.”
One part of this plan is known as the Eastern Data Western Compute Project 东数西算 Dongshu Xisuan, which is essentially a nationwide digital infrastructure project aiming to optimize the country’s computing power. To do this, the project aims to build several new data centers in inland areas which have fewer users of data but more ample energy resources. The project has been described as “the north-south water transfer” of the digital age, thus alluding to China’s recent nationwide infrastructure project to channel water from the country’s wet south to its arid North. Several cities have been chosen as new computing hubs, including Guizhou (where the Gui’an New Area had already begun attracting cloud computing facilities like those of Tencent and Apple), as well as Zhangjiakou in Northern Hebei, Qinyang in Gansu.
The plan was issued by national authorities but is also engaging the cooperation of China’s main telecom providers who are providing some of the investment in new data centers. Of course, given the distance of some of these inland data centers from major metropolises, they would first prioritize functions such as data storage that do not require the highest transfer speeds or low latency. Data centers located in the heart of urban areas may help facilitate faster and more instant communication for smart city systems in those particular cities.
In 2022, the National Information Standard Smart City Working Group ( a division of the influential China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), under Ministry of Information Technology), published a white paper on the development of city brains, aiming to standardize their construction as part of national digitalization efforts.
Cloud computing centers are simultaneously embedded within national plans to boost the country’s overall “computing power”, but also serve as powerful icons of individual city’s digitalization efforts. Data centers are littered across urban and remote areas worldwide. But only in China has the design of data centers gone far beyond their normally mundane warehouse-like forms.
As a research paper on design of data center construction in urban areas notes:
“With the rapid development of new technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence and the implementation of the national strategy of "channelling computing resources from the east to the west",the continuous improvement of our country's data resource storage, computing and application requirements has led to the rapid growth of data center scale. Through practical cases,it introduces how to solve the problem of coordination between industrial mass buildings and urban functions,and the effective combination of data center and energy station when the data center is inevitably located in the downtown area of the city.” 5
Most Chinese cities typically had a temple often known as the Chenghuang Miao, or “temple to the city god” that would house the effigy, often a god of the earth, responsible for protecting the city and ensuring its prosperity. Today the cloud data center has become the new “city god temple” for the digital age, housing the servers that need to be kept cool and appeased if the city and nation are to develop and flourish. The city god was conceived of as the local magistrate of the underworld. Interestingly, some city god temples feature a large abacus or 算盘, which were thought to calculate the good and bad deeds one had done in their life. Today, supercomputing centers hold the new 算盘, facilitating the calculations to run city operations and boost China’s national computing power.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/power-usage-effectiveness-PUE
http://www.archcollege.com/archcollege/2021/12/50391.html
http://sn.news.cn/2023-03/20/c_1129445791.htm
数字福建是数字中国的思想源头 《光明日报》( 2018年04月23日01版)
张琪,吴礼杨 (2022) 位于城市中心区域的数据中心建筑设计探究