China Unveils Vast Plan to Build Regional Data Center Clusters

China has launched an initiative to build regional data center clusters that it says will draw in hundreds of billions of yuan in annual investment, as part of a broad push to shift the focus of infrastructure development to new economic drivers.

The announcement has been summed up by the slogan “processing eastern data in the west (东数西算),” according to a Thursday statement (link in Chinese) from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the top economic planner. That means building data centers in underdeveloped, energy-rich western regions to meet the data processing and storage needs of China’s wealthier east.