AS the sun beats down on the edge of the Tengger Desert on a summer day, rows of photovoltaic panels stretch across the dunes, turning intense desert light into electricity.
Nearby, the steady hum of servers fills a data center run by telecom giant China Mobile in the city of Zhongwei, northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. In May, one of the center’s data facilities began receiving electricity directly from the solar power station, powering computing capacity for AI model training, inference and other applications.
Green power now accounts for over 80 percent of the electricity consumed by the facility, according to Zhang Xu, a computing operation and maintenance engineer at China Mobile’s Ningxia branch. The solar farm in renewable-energy-rich Ningxia is one of China’s earliest projects to supply green power directly to data centers. The move comes as China seeks to bring its growing computing capacity closer to the renewable energy resources needed to power it. The 500-megawatt solar farm is only part of the equation.
About 40 kilometres south, a 1.5-gigawatt wind farm is under construction and is scheduled to be connected to the grid in September. The wind power will complement solar generation at night, helping supply data centers with green power around the clock. — Xinhua
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