Key Characteristics and Development Trends of Data Centers in the New Infrastructure Era

Under the wave of "new infrastructure," data centers exhibit new characteristics and development trends, as revealed by the 2020 China Data Center Industry Insight Report.

Independent third‑party data centers are gaining advantage over telecom operators because they can be built faster, offer higher customer customization, place greater emphasis on operations, and generally achieve lower PUE, making them popular with clients.

In the past five years, mobile internet and big data have been the main drivers of data‑center growth: rapid increases in net‑user numbers and mobile traffic on the demand side, and higher storage and computing requirements from big data and AI on the supply side.

Future growth will be driven by 5G, the Internet of Things, industrial internet, and enterprise cloud adoption: 5G provides significantly higher bandwidth than 4G and native support for independent enterprise networking, laying the foundation for IoT and industrial internet, which will continue to benefit the data‑center sector.

First‑tier cities face scarce resources and strict energy‑efficiency mandates (typically requiring PUE < 1.4), making data‑center sites in these areas highly valuable despite strong demand.

Intelligent operation and maintenance (O&M) is being applied more widely: as data‑center scale grows, labor costs rise, and customers demand dynamic resource scaling, traditional manual O&M can no longer keep up. Sensor‑based monitoring, DCIM systems, and autonomous inspection robots enable smarter O&M.

The report identifies four major development trends:

Trend 1: Dual development of core and peripheral regions, with first‑tier cities reaching saturation and expansion moving to surrounding and energy‑abundant areas.

Trend 2: Dual development of large‑scale and edge, where cloudification pushes data centers toward massive facilities and 5G accelerates edge‑computing deployment.

Trend 3: Horizontal integration, with increased mergers and acquisitions.

Trend 4: Vertical extension along the industry chain, expanding upstream and downstream.

In the mobile‑internet era, data traffic keeps rising; the average monthly mobile data per household reached 7.82 GB last year, 1.69 times that of 2018. Enterprise data is exploding, yet less than 2 % is stored and only 10 % of stored data is used for analysis, indicating a large gap in data‑storage utilization. Consequently, big‑data centers (IDCs) are becoming increasingly important.

Source: iResearch (reprinted with attribution). Editor: PuPu.