Stories of High-Quality Development | Data centers thrive in desert

Narrator: Zhu Yun, general manager of China Unicom Zhongwei Cloud Data Center

Good natural endowments provide a strong foundation for northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to develop its digital economy. Located at the geometric center of China's territory, Ningxia connects markets in the east with the resource-rich west. With every major city within just 2,000 kilometers, it represents the optimal path choice for fiber optic network coverage across the country. With an average annual temperature of 8.8 degrees Celsius and over 280 days of excellent environmental conditions each year, Zhongwei in Ningxia offers ideal conditions for building natural air-cooled data centers, which helps enterprises lower costs. It also enjoys abundant and complementary energy resources, including coal, wind, and solar power, ensuring a stable, sufficient, and cost-effective electricity supply.

These advantages have made Ningxia an attractive partner for many regions and enterprises in east China.

In the industrial park of Xiamen King Long United Automotive Industry Co., Ltd., a company headquartered in southeast China's Fujian, an autonomous security patrol vehicle is on duty. From its rooftop gimbal, audio-video feeds, lidar and millimeter-wave radar data are collected by a camera. The data is transmitted via 5G to a cloud center 2,000 kilometers away in Zhongwei, where AI recognition and risk alerts are completed in just 100 milliseconds.

More cross-regional cooperation uses the "east data, west computing" project as a link to achieve seamless connectivity across devices. For example, when someone enters a question into an app on a mobile phone, cloud computing power enables the system to provide a comprehensive and accurate answer in a very short time. Moreover, it can quickly sort and refine information according to the user's personalized needs, saving time and effort.

Digitalization and intelligent technologies now permeate every aspect of social life, with computing power playing an increasingly pivotal role in both production and daily activities. Using data as a link, Zhongwei's huge computing power is helping to promote high-quality development across all areas of production and daily life.