Alibaba Zhejiang Cloud Computing Liquid‑Cooled Data Center Achieves 5A Green Design Rating

On September 15, Alibaba's Zhejiang Cloud Computing Renhe liquid‑cooled data center received the 5A (design class) green rating at the ODCC 2020 summit, becoming the nation’s first data center to achieve this top tier.

The rating, jointly administered by the Open Data Center Committee, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and the Green Grid, evaluates energy efficiency, energy‑saving technologies and green management, with additional points for innovation and green building practices.

The Renhe facility incorporates full‑immersion liquid cooling, high‑voltage direct current (HVDC), distributed power redundancy and AI‑driven optimization, supporting roughly 30,000 servers and achieving an annual design PUE of 1.12.

Immersion cooling eliminates low‑efficiency components, enables year‑round natural cooling, reduces fan noise, and improves operational comfort, addressing the growing power consumption of high‑performance computing workloads.

Located in humid, hot Hangzhou, the center overcomes regional cooling challenges, delivering an expected operational PUE of 1.09—surpassing even the most efficient dry‑climate data centers in northern China.

The achievement aligns with China’s 2020 focus on new‑infrastructure investment, where data centers are prioritized and local standards such as the "Data Center Energy Consumption Limit" are being enforced, further accelerating the adoption of liquid‑cooling technology.