By LU Keyan
In a basement room of a Guangzhou hospital, an information center comprising thirty servers stores and processes all the data generated in the hospital. This one of the smartest health care facilities in Guangdong Province, and a showcase of healthcare’s digital transformation. But it consumes a humongous amount of energy.
In 2020, data centers in China used 200 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, more than enough to power the entire city of Shanghai. In the race to be the fastest and smartest, mitigating the environmental footprint of big data has taken on a new urgency.
Network Energy
China plans to reach its carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. Tech companies like Tencent and Huawei have been quick to come up with low-carbon digital solutions. The data center represents the combined efforts of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, China Mobile and Huawei. Built by Huawei, the center may give us some idea of how a low-carbon digital infrastructure may look.
Inside the hospital, medicine delivery robots already buzz around wards and nurses’ stations. The healthcare industry is no stranger to big data. The Huawei project, however, takes digitization to another level. Key is consolidating data generated from functions such as diagnosis, treatment, and payment into one interconnected web, so that previous information silos can talk to and enhance one another.
A large computational load means a complicated design, long construction time and high energy consumption. The hospital data center uses a modular design. Each module integrates power, cooling, rack and cabling, and management systems, reducing construction time by half. Ventilation and cooling technology improve energy efficiency by 30 percent. The amount of electricity saved in a single day can power two wards for a year.
Huawei’s Network Energy business builds energy-efficient hardware for businesses. The modular data center in Guangzhou is just one of its many applications. Although Huawei has not disclosed the financial details of the Network Energy division, it is reportedly one of the fastest-growing sectors of the company. Behind the growth are two pressing global trends: mounting digitization and the imperative to reduce emissions.
Cloud across the sun
Huawei’s YAO Quan told Jiemian News that all of Network Energy’s technology is proprietary, thus not subject to sanction-induced supply constraints. Huawei has plans to expand the scope of Network Energy to deliver low-carbon and zero-carbon computing in transportation, construction, power generation and transmission, and ICT infrastructure.
Yao made a case for an AI-powered solar power plant. “It takes 15 people two weeks to complete a round of maintenance work for a traditional 100-megawatt solar power plant. For an AI-powered one, it only takes ten minutes,” he said.
