You may have heard a lot about the word “cloud”. Not the clouds in the sky, but the “cloud” that stores your photos, emails, movies and music.
The name might make you think that it’s just like real clouds. But in fact, it’s made of millions of hard drives (硬盘), computer servers (服务器) and fiber-optic cables (光纤电缆). When you open a website (网站) online, you are actually asking a server to give you data . The data may travel thousands of kilometers from a data center to your computer, through cables underground.
1. Where are these data centers? In China, most are now in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. They take up lots of land and energy (电能). According to Economic Information Daily, data centers in Beijing used more than 8 percent of the total energy used by the city in 2018.
2. Recently, China made plans to build 10 data center groups in eight areas. Many are in western and northern regions like Ningxia, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Guizhou.
3. There is more land in these areas. They also have more green energy, like wind and solar energy (太阳能). This can make the data centers more environmentally friendly.
4. Building data centers can also help the development of these areas.
