China Building City For Cloud Computing

CWmike writes "First it was China's 'big hole' sighting that brought us the supercomputing race. Now China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data center, one of the projects fueling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending. The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million square feet, with the initial data center space accounting for approximately 646,000 square feet, says IBM, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to build it. A Sputnik moment? Patrick Thibodeau reports that these big projects, whether supercomputers or sprawling software development office parks, can garner a lot of attention. But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US."

Comments

How convient

[antifoidulus]

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!

Re:How convient

[arivanov]

Almost spot on.

You forgot the regular bribe to the party official in charge of the facility so he does not sell access to your data to your competitor as well as bribes for everyone and everything under him for this same reason.

It is quite funny when people call China communist. It is capitalism taken to the ultimate limit where anything and everything is for sale with very few of the moral restrictions which the West has inherited from the 20 centuries of its "Sunday school" upbringing.

Re:How convient

[VortexCortex]

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and...

...my encrypted data still won't make a lick of sense to anyone but me!
"I'd be a fool not to" use encryption.

1/5 of spending?

[shutdown -p now]

Who cares about the absolute figure, anyway, it's the bang for the buck that's important. Soviet space program was cheaper than US one as well.

Awesome

[ZirconCode]

And in two years it will be just as obsolete as square feet.

Just muscle politics

[gweihir]

Software is more important than hardware today. The whole cloud computing movement shows that in many cases hardware is just a cheap commodity. This datacenter is some politicians building themselves a monument and pretending to be ahead or at least on the same level with the west. This is just a lot of hot air, but otherwise quite irrelevant. Building a large datacenter is pretty easy, once you have the cash, and does not show any level of technological sophistication.

6 million square feet...

[jpapon]

My buddy is a commercial real estate agent in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park/Sunnyvale (so, Silicon Valley) area, and let me tell you, there's ALOT more than 6 million square feet of office space available to rent. The number may sound impressive, but it's nothing compared to what they have in Northern California alone. I mean, the Oracle campus in Redwood City is over 4 million square feet all by itself.

Of course, it's not about the space, but what you do with it...

Is it located in one of their "ghost cities"?

[jbarr]

Obviously off-topic, but interesting and wonderful fodder for the tin-foil hat crowd

It appears that China has built several cities meant to house millions of people, yet they remain completely empty:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html
http://www.libertynewsonline.com/article_340_30137.php