Alibaba’s Green Low‑Carbon Data Center Initiatives and Immersive Liquid‑Cooling Practices

On July 15, the closing ceremony of the 2021 (20th) China Internet Conference, hosted by the China Internet Association, highlighted the theme “New stage, new concepts, new pattern—Internet leading digital economy development,” and featured ODCC Vice‑Chairman and Alibaba Cloud IDC Division General Manager Gao Shanyuan discussing challenges and trends for new‑type data centers under the “new infrastructure + dual carbon” background.

On July 14, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the “Three‑Year Action Plan for New‑Type Data Center Development (2021‑2023),” emphasizing “advanced technology” and “green low‑carbon” as key keywords, urging the creation, operation, and transformation of green data centers toward efficient, clean, intensive, and circular development.

Since 2018, Alibaba has built five super data centers across major economic zones and plans to construct more than ten additional ones; in April 2020 the company announced a 200 billion‑yuan investment over three years for core technologies such as cloud operating systems, servers, chips, and networks, as well as future data‑center construction.

Gao Shanyuan noted that Alibaba is expanding data‑center coverage nationwide while actively complying with national green‑data‑center policies by scaling liquid‑cooling commercialization, open‑sourcing industry standards, and reducing energy consumption—citing the Hangzhou Renhe data center as the world’s largest fully immersed liquid‑cooling facility with a PUE as low as 1.09, and the Guangdong Heyuan data center aiming for 100 % zero‑carbon clean energy, becoming Alibaba’s first carbon‑neutral large‑scale data center.

The timeline of Alibaba’s liquid‑cooling milestones includes the 2015 start of immersion‑cooling exploration, the 2018 launch of the industry’s first immersed liquid‑cooling production cluster, the 2020 completion of a fully immersed liquid‑cooling data center, and the release of an open immersion‑cooling data‑center specification for free download.

Alibaba’s infrastructure innovation remains “inclusive,” leveraging advanced technologies at scale to lower cloud service costs for end users, and predicts that immersion liquid‑cooling will become the next industry standard, driven by carbon‑neutral policies, renewable energy, large‑scale storage, and AI‑enabled smart operations.