Data centers have significantly influenced our lives since their inception in the late 1950s, with their impact becoming increasingly apparent in the first two decades of this century. As a pillar of the digital economy, data centers have played a crucial role in driving global economic growth. According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology's Global Digital Economy White Paper, the digital economy of 47 major countries accounted for up to 45% of their GDP in 2021. With data becoming the fifth factor of production after land, labor, capital, and technology, and computing power being a new type of productivity, data centers have emerged as a crucial foundation of the digital world.
Despite being around for decades, data centers are experiencing new industry changes due to the rapid development of new technologies such as generative AI, cloud computing, and big data. This has led to a surge in demand for computing power from all industries, presenting a new golden age for global data centers. However, such a boom in data centers has led to a significant increase in energy consumption.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), data centers are expected to account for 4% of global power consumption by 2030, up from the current 3%. However, the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2023 reveals that the average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of global data centers has remained at around 1.58, indicating significant room for improvement. PUE is calculated as the total energy consumption of data center equipment divided by IT equipment energy consumption, with a perfect score being 1.0.
In recent years, there has been an increased demand for simplified deployment, intelligent operations and maintenance (O&M), and data center safety. Rather than merely housing computing, network, and storage devices, data centers must evolve into new infrastructure for the digital industry. Digitalization and intelligence have ushered in a new era for data centers. When considering the future of data centers from the perspective of full-lifecycle management, where are they headed?
Beginning: We are on the cusp of a new era of industrial transformation.
While data centers are a product of computers, modern data centers or Internet data centers (IDCs) emerged in the 1990s. They gained significant traction during the era of the Internet and cloud computing. The energy management of global data centers over the past three decades can be categorized into the following phases:
Phase 1: Data centers grew at scale, with a focus on availability and reliability.
During the early stages of data center development, the industry experienced rapid growth, with a focus on expanding the scale and number of racks. Although energy consumption and efficiency were managed extensively, the industry faced challenges such as low rack deployment rates, high energy consumption, and complex O&M costs, which remain bottlenecks today. According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the average PUE for ultra-large data centers in China was 1.46 by the end of 2019, while large data centers had an average PUE of 1.55 (with the lowest being 1.15), showing a slight change from the previous two years. The national average PUE for data centers currently under construction in China is approximately 1.41, while the designed average PUEs for ultra-large and large data centers are 1.36 and 1.39, respectively.
Phase 2: Green data centers are imperative for meeting carbon peaking and neutrality targets.
To date, numerous countries have pledged to advance the eco-friendly development of data centers. European data center operators and industry associations have declared their aim for carbon neutrality in data centers by the year 2030. In China, the MIIT has mandated a reduction in PUE for ultra-large and large data centers to below 1.3 by 2025, as part of the Green and Low-Carbon Development Action Plan for the Information and Communication Industry (2022–2025). In its East-to-West Computing Resource Transfer program, China sets a stricter standard: the PUE in Western China should be lower than 1.2, and that in Eastern China lower than 1.25.
Phase 3: Data centers gradually evolve into "all-rounders."
As the industrial Internet and various industries shift towards digitalization, there is an increased demand for data centers to meet higher standards. These standards include intelligent and simplified O&M, modular deployment, elastic capacity expansion, comprehensive reliability, availability, and low carbon emissions. In response to the challenges of the digital-intelligent era, Huawei Digital Power has introduced the innovative concept of GSSR (green, simple, smart, and reliable), which provides a roadmap for developing next-generation data centers.
Future: Why are GSSR data centers expected to dominate?
So, what sets GSSR data centers apart in leading the way in future industrial development? Huawei Digital Power recognizes data center facilities as a new digital infrastructure essential to transforming the data center industry. On the one hand, adhering to "more bits, fewer watts, and less CO2" allows each watt to support more connections and computing power. On the other hand, utilizing a modular, intelligent, and secure top-level design can significantly reduce CAPEX and OPEX while improving O&M efficiency throughout the entire energy management lifecycle of data centers.
With cutting-edge technologies at our disposal, GSSR data centers deliver more bits while consuming fewer watts, thanks to three key features: high efficiency and energy savings, high density and space optimization, and full-link carbon reduction.
In traditional cooling solutions, frequent heat exchange results in poor cooling performance. Huawei's indirect evaporative cooling EHU400 solution uses natural cooling sources to the fullest extent and employs AI-based optimization to exchange heat only once, maximizing cooling efficiency for its GSSR data centers. This has resulted in a reduced PUE of 1.15 for the Huawei Cloud Ulanqab Data Center.
To ensure an efficient and reliable power supply, Huawei launched the FusionPower6000 3.0 solution, increasing the entire link's efficiency from 94.5% to 97.8%. The FusionPower6000 3.0 can seamlessly switch back to battery mode when working in S-ECO mode. In 2023, Huawei released the international edition of the FusionPower6000 3.0 solution for large data centers. It replaces cables with prefabricated bridge-like busbars for plug-and-play, saving over 30% of the installation footprint and shortening delivery time from two months to two weeks. The entire link is visible, manageable, and controllable through intelligent O&M, and the service life of key components is predicted through over 150 temperature measurement points on the entire link, ensuring intelligent and proactive safety.
Huawei Digital Power offers its cutting-edge Fan Wall Chilled Water Solution for cooling efficiency. This technology can support a water inlet temperature of up to 20°C, resulting in a 15% reduction in power consumption of chillers. In the case of the China Unicom IDC building project, where large-capacity electromechanical equipment could not be reconstructed, Huawei's advanced fan wall air conditioners were implemented. Because these air conditioners use water with an inlet temperature of 18°C instead of the typical 12°C, the overall energy consumption was reduced by over 20%.
Simplified deployment and maintenance have enabled the construction and operation of data centers to become more cost-effective and efficient. Nowadays, modular power systems are the preferred choice for data center solutions because they significantly improve construction efficiency. With prefabricated and modular construction technologies, GSSR data centers can reduce onsite engineering workload and shorten time to market (TTM) by more than 50%.
For instance, by utilizing Huawei's ecosystem solution of FusionDC, the construction period of a 1000-rack data center can be shortened from over 18 months to 6–9 months. GSSR data centers are equipped with intelligent O&M and AI-based energy efficiency optimization, which ensure efficient O&M while improving energy efficiency. The cooling system of a data center consumes approximately 30% to 45% of its power. Therefore, reducing the electricity the cooling system consumes is crucial for energy conservation and emission reduction.
Huawei's iCooling solution utilizes AI-based technologies to optimize the energy efficiency of cooling systems, resulting in precise and on-demand cooling. This intelligent solution has been deployed at Huawei Cloud Langfang Data Center, which houses over 4000 racks, and has reduced its PUE from 1.42 to 1.26, saving more than 30 million kWh of electricity annually. In the first phase of deployment at Jinqiao Data Center of Shanghai Stock Exchange, the iCooling solution managed 2000 racks and reduced the annual PUE by 13%. It is projected that upon implementation across all 18,600 racks, the solution will save over 20 million kWh of electricity annually.
GSSR data centers ensure architecture security, active safety, and cyber security. In the past, due to the lack of effective monitoring technologies, many critical components in the data center facility system were replaced only after faults occurred. These components include busway capacitors and fans of the UPS, which frequently fail. GSSR data centers now implement an active safety mechanism that collects data on capacitor temperature, load rate, and ripple characteristics, predicts component lifespans using AI algorithms, and generates warnings before faults occur. This represents a shift from reactive to active and predictive maintenance, significantly reducing the failure rate and enhancing the reliability of data centers.
Co-creation: Expediting GSSR data center deployments
Currently, the GSSR concept is being embraced by an increasing number of partners and enterprise customers in the industry.
This innovative idea is the product of years of innovation by Huawei Digital Power in the domain of new energy infrastructure for the digital industry. In addition to integrating advanced digital and power electronics technologies, GSSR data centers also reflect the vision of Huawei Digital Power for the data center industry. Huawei Digital Power continuously works with industry leaders, technical experts, and industry customers to release a White Paper on the Top 10 Data Center Facility Trends every year, which is of great significance for the development of the data center facility industry, and in particular, for large and ultra-large data centers under construction.
With regard to sustainable development, Huawei Digital Power believes that data centers should be measured by more comprehensive indicators rather than just relying on PUE. These indicators include renewable energy utilization, water usage effectiveness (WUE), carbon usage effectiveness (CUE), space usage effectiveness (SUE), grid usage effectiveness (GUE), material recovery rate, and lifetime contaminant emissions.
Through in-depth collaboration with ecosystem partners and industry customers, Huawei Digital Power has been gradually implementing cutting-edge technologies, innovative products, and solutions by adhering to the GSSR concept.
In 2023, Centrin Data and Huawei Digital Power collaborated to produce a green and reliable power supply and distribution solution designed to save time, power, and space and prevent potential problems. They applied the "Centrin Data - Intelligent Power Pod" model to the data center in Ulanqab, which integrated the power source, grid, load, and storage, aiming to establish a demo base for data centers.
BodaData deployed Huawei's FusionPower6000 3.0 solution in the intelligent computing center in Qianhai, Shenzhen, to create a power supply and distribution system with full-chain convergence, prefabrication, and AI management. These efforts were made to make the data center simple, green, smart, and reliable.
Driven by information technology and the call of carbon neutrality, the global data center industry is moving towards GSSR. GSSR is a leading management concept and a flagbearer of low-carbon and intelligent data centers. It is expected to transform data centers from major energy consumers to a new digital industry infrastructure.
