People visit the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2024 in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, Aug. 28, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]

China had by the end of June 2024 directly invested over 43.5 billion yuan (about 6.1 billion U.S. dollars) in the construction of eight computing hubs forming part of its mega data project dubbed "east data, west computing," an official said Thursday.

Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration, speaking at a big data expo in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, said total investment driven by the construction of the hubs had surpassed 200 billion yuan, while the number of data center racks had exceeded 1.95 million.

As a key part of China's digital infrastructure, the project is designed to develop the capacity of inland regions to store and process data transmitted from economically advanced eastern areas.

Initiated in 2022, the project has seen the full steam advance of the construction of the eight national computing hubs. In addition, China also plans to have 10 national data center clusters as part of the project.

Highlighting the steady progress of the project, Liu said network latency between the eastern and western hubs has generally met the 20-millisecond (ms) requirement, while the Power Usage Effectiveness of newly established data centers has been reduced to as low as 1.04.

The computing power demand in the east is being met in the west, and the effects of computing power aggregation have begun to emerge, Liu added.

As computing power represents a new quality productive force in the age of digital economy, Liu said China will encourage cities to pilot different technical routes over the next two to three years in pursuit of the best solution to national data infrastructure construction.

China aims to form a preliminary comprehensive computing power infrastructure system by the end of 2025.

The China International Big Data Industry Expo 2024 is currently being held in Guiyang and will end on Friday. It has attracted over 21,000 guests and secured the participation of 414 domestic and international companies.

Participants include domestic industry leaders such as Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.com, as well as 77 overseas companies from more than 30 countries and regions, including the United States, Germany and Canada.