Guizhou data center obtains engineering innovation award

Tencent's Qixing data center in Guian New Area, Guizhou province. [Photo/China Daily]

Tencent's Qixing data center in Guian New Area, Southwest China's Guizhou province, was recently granted first prize in the Tunnel and Underground Space Engineering Innovation Award.

The Tunnel and Underground Space Engineering Innovation Award was jointly organized and reviewed by the China Highway and Transportation Society and Tongji University.

The award was created this year and a total of 88 applications were received. After expert review, five special prizes, 10 first prizes and 20 second prizes were awarded.

The Qixing data center was designed by Guizhou Transportation Planning Survey and Design Academe Co, a resident enterprise of the Guiyang National High-tech Industrial Development Zone, which is also located in Guizhou province.

The center is the first cave-style data center in the country and received a total investment of 820 million yuan ($116.98 million).

It covers an area of 776 mu (51.73 hectares) and has a construction area of about 30,000 square meters, which can accommodate 50,000 servers.

Construction of the center started in September 2017 and was completed in July 2020.

It is a green and efficient disaster recovery data center with high concealment, high protection, and high security. It is also the data center with the highest protection level in China.

According to Yan Xia, director of the technical quality department of Guizhou Transportation Planning Survey and Design Academe Co, designers looked beyond conventional ground-based data center models, and for the first time proposed a cavern-type data center building system.

Yan said, "The data center was designed according to a nuclear bomb level safety standard."

The center can withstand natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as man-made explosion disasters. This improves and guarantees the safety of the data center.