China turns ancient caves into big data treasury

Guizhou now has China's first national big data engineering lab and first big data bourse, with the country's leading combined computing power. As one of the regions with the world's most ultra-large data centers, the province is now labelled "digital Guizhou."

The province also vows to see the overall output value of its electronic and information sector empowered by big data exceed 350 billion yuan by 2025. And by that time, its digital economy is expected to account for about one-half of its GDP.

Luo Dan, a researcher at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said that data centers deal with the reception, processing, storage, and transmission of data streams, and such data centers have become one of the most significant information infrastructures in today's digital economy.

"Building the centers, a conventional energy consumption behemoth, inside the caves can reduce energy usage and is massively significant to our eco-friendly data center construction in achieving a digital China and our carbon neutrality goal as scheduled," Luo said.