Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure’s Carbon‑Neutral Practices and Green Data Center Innovations

At the 2022 China Digital Economy Development Conference jointly hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Guangdong Provincial Government, Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure researcher Qu Haifeng presented the company’s carbon‑neutral practices during the Digital New Infrastructure Forum.

China’s digital economy has grown at an average annual rate of 16.6% over the past five years, accounting for 39.8% of GDP, making it a key driver of sustained economic growth.

Alibaba Cloud, as a pioneer in low‑carbon cloud infrastructure, leverages self‑research innovations, scientific data‑center layout, and energy‑structure optimization to build energy‑efficient, environmentally friendly facilities that support digital transformation.

Self‑Research Innovation Improves Cloud Computing Efficiency – By developing full‑stack hardware and software technologies, Alibaba Cloud continuously enhances the power‑performance ratio of its infrastructure, incorporating liquid cooling, power supplies, servers, networking, and intelligent operations to reduce carbon emissions.

Since 2015, Alibaba Cloud has explored various liquid‑cooling solutions; the Zhejiang Renhe Data Center, launched in September 2020, features China’s largest single‑phase immersion cooling cluster with an annual PUE as low as 1.09. In December 2021, the company released its first single‑phase immersion cooling solution, achieving a 34.6% reduction in overall energy consumption.

Alibaba’s Nantong Data Center is the world’s first large‑scale facility using a self‑developed 10 kV AC‑to‑DC uninterruptible power system, recognized in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s 2020‑2021 “National Telecom Energy‑Saving Technology Product Recommendation Catalog” under the “Green Data Center” category.

In 2021, Alibaba Cloud’s “Green Energy Innovation Solution” won the Paulson Sustainable Development Award for green innovation, and its renewable energy trading volumes ranked first in China’s 2021 Green Power Procurement Enterprise Ranking.

Guided by the national “Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System” plan, Alibaba Cloud promotes resource‑efficient regional deployment, encouraging migration of public‑cloud workloads to western regions and collaborating with North China Electric Power University on a renewable‑energy‑driven “computing‑power‑electricity” optimization project, the first cross‑regional demonstration of coordinated scheduling between data centers and power grids.

By 2022, Alibaba Cloud’s self‑built data‑center wind and solar power purchases approached the total volume of the previous year, reaching 264 GWh of green electricity and 395 GWh of zero‑carbon clean energy, cumulatively reducing CO₂ emissions by 575,000 tons.

These initiatives illustrate how cloud infrastructure is transitioning from scale‑focused growth to green, low‑carbon, and intensive construction, strengthening the foundation for high‑quality development of China’s digital economy.