China is building the world's highest-altitude cloud computing data centre in Tibet that will meet the data storage needs of the country and South Asian nations like Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, official media reported on Thursday. The data centre is located in a high-tech zone of the Tibetan regional capital city of Lhasa located at an altitude of around 3,656 metres, making it the highest-altitude data centre in the world, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. With a total planned investment of 11.8 billion yuan (over USD 1.80 billion), the project will provide services in areas such as video rendering, autonomous driving, distance-learning data backup, among others, according to its Lhasa-based operator, the Ningsuan Technology Group. It is expected to provide those services to major Chinese provinces and cities, as well as Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and part of Southeast Asia, the company said. The first phase of the project is expected to be put into operation in 2021, the report said. After the completion of phase one, the data centre will have 10,000 machine cabinets and an annual revenue of 1.5 billion yuan (about USD 223.5 million), meeting the data storage needs of key clients in the country and in South Asia. Wang Jun, Ningsuan's vice president and chief marketing officer, said as Lhasa pushes forward with the construction of a regional bureau for stepping up international communications services, Tibet will become a big-data industrial base.
