As the digital economy accelerates, energy consumption and carbon emissions from data centers are becoming increasingly critical. Recently, the "Guidelines for Building Green Data Centers" were officially released, establishing standards and clear pathways for China's green, low-carbon, and standardized data center development to support coordinated growth between computing power industries and ecological protection.
Guidelines cover the full lifecycle of data centers—from site selection and architectural design to equipment procurement, operations management, and resource recycling—establishing a systematic green construction framework. Focused on energy conservation and carbon reduction, the document promotes optimized power distribution and cooling architectures, advanced low-carbon technologies such as liquid cooling, waste heat recovery, and intelligent operations, and retrofits for legacy facilities. These measures effectively lower PUE values and enhance overall energy efficiency.
The guidelines also emphasize resource circularity, calling for green procurement and equipment recycling mechanisms to reduce waste and environmental pollution while driving green upgrades across the supply chain. Additionally, the guidelines balance safety with low-carbon development by establishing parallel principles for data security, operational safety, and green construction. They explicitly reject the common pitfalls of prioritizing construction over maintenance or computing power over energy efficiency.
Implementing this guideline will standardize industry construction, address high energy consumption in data centers, and drive the transformation of computing infrastructure toward efficiency, low carbon intensity, consolidation, and security. This establishes a robust computing foundation for China's green, high-quality digital economy development and the achievement of its "dual carbon" goals.