Northwest China's Ningxia region aims to make more efforts to build green, low-carbon and safe data center clusters, network infrastructures and integrated computing power scheduling systems, China Daily reported on September 15.

A batch of computing companies including Amazon Web Services, Meituan, China Unicom, China Mobile and China Telecom have built data centers in Ningxia to offer cloud computing services.

“Computing power, which serves as a core productive force in the era of digital economy, has become an important engine driving China's economic growth,” said Mai Yanzhou, Vice-Governor of Ningxia.

Mai made the remarks at the first Data Valley in Western China Computing Industry Conference, which kicked off on September 14 in Yinchuan, capital of Ningxia.

In addition, a total of 14 strategic cooperation agreements worth RMB271 billion ($38.9 billion) and 24 projects with an investment of RMB72.7 billion ($10.37 billion) were signed during the conference, according to China Daily.

In February, China launched a mega project involving the construction of eight national computing hubs and 10 national data center clusters, indicating that its strategy to channel more computing resources from the country's eastern regions to its less developed yet resource-rich western regions is in full swing.

The project is conducive to promoting green development and utilizing green energy in the western regions, and continuously optimizing the energy efficiency of data centers, experts said.

China's total computing power scale now ranks second globally, said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. By the end of 2021, super-large and large data centers in use exceeded 450 nationwide, while intelligent computing centers surpassed 20, said China Daily.