Tencent Qixingdong Vault Data Center

Project Overview:

The Tencent Qixing Data Center in Gui'an New Area is located at the intersection of Jinma Avenue and Tianfu Road in Gui'an New Area. The project covers a total area of approximately 770 mu, with tunnel space totaling about 30,000 square meters. Upon completion, it will eventually house 200,000 servers. This project represents the world's first mountain-based data center—a new infrastructure initiative for the big-data era of the 21st century. By fully leveraging the natural mountainous terrain and geographical environment, it has been designed as a green, highly efficient disaster recovery data center boasting "high concealment, high protection, and high security." The disaster recovery data zone is situated within an underground mountain cavern, whose entrances have been landscaped and greened to blend seamlessly with the surrounding forests and natural environment, ensuring exceptional concealment. The data center is protected by a three-tiered security system: an independent perimeter fence along the park boundary, a protective barrier encircling the mountain roads, and fortified security and blast-proof iron gates at the cavern entrances. These measures provide comprehensive security for the data center. The mountainous rock formations and geological layers can effectively prevent or mitigate the impact of nuclear weapon strikes, while also offering robust protection against natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as man-made explosive threats, thereby significantly enhancing and guaranteeing the data center’s safety. Moreover, the rock mass of the cavern boasts excellent thermal insulation and temperature stability, maintaining a consistently stable temperature within the cavern space. Combined with Guizhou’s favorable climate, clean energy supply, and cutting-edge blockchain technology, this data center achieves green, efficient, and energy-saving operations.

Project Highlights:

A world-class, pioneering mountain-based data center. This project represents a global innovation—the world’s first-ever mountain-based data center—with absolutely no prior experience to draw upon. It places extremely high demands on the designers’ expertise and capabilities, requiring them to break away from conventional design approaches and embark on a completely new design process to meet the data center’s rational requirements. The tunnel-cave design cannot rely on standard specifications applicable to highways, railways, or municipal infrastructure; instead, it must be tailored specifically to the client’s needs. All aspects—including tunnel clearance, ventilation systems, and various functional intersections—must be comprehensively and meticulously planned and arranged in alignment with the data storage requirements.
A green, highly efficient disaster recovery data center featuring "high concealment, high protection, and high security." The disaster recovery data zone is located inside a mountain tunnel, with the tunnel entrances landscaped and greened to blend seamlessly with the surrounding forests and natural environment, ensuring exceptional concealment. The tunnel’s rock mass boasts excellent thermal insulation and temperature-stabilizing properties, maintaining a consistently stable temperature within the tunnel space. Combined with Guizhou’s favorable climate, clean green energy, and cutting-edge T-block technology, this data center achieves green, efficient, and energy-saving operations.
A world-leading low-carbon data center. The project integrates the comprehensive functions of mountain “air-raid shelters,” Guizhou’s “natural air conditioning,” tunnel “constant temperature and humidity control,” and shaft “heat-dissipating chimneys.” Through meticulous, end-to-end design, the data center has achieved green, low-carbon operation. Measured by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, its energy consumption efficiency—expressed as the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)—is below 1.1, significantly lower than the average PUE of newly built data centers in China, which stands at 1.73. This results in an exceptionally high level of energy efficiency, placing the data center among the world’s leading facilities. In 2020, Premier Li Keqiang visited the project site and praised it as an “environmentally friendly, low-carbon” green initiative.
A cavern-based data center featuring cutting-edge technological breakthroughs and innovative design. This project is an ultra-large-scale integrated engineering undertaking that encompasses underground spatial structures, fire protection, civil defense, lighting, ventilation, power supply, water supply and drainage systems. As the world’s first of its kind, this new cavern infrastructure project seamlessly integrates architectural aesthetics with functional harmony. The cavern spaces are intricately interwoven, with all caverns characterized by narrow clearances. Multiple cavern tunnels run parallel to one another, and numerous ventilation shafts, lateral connecting passages, and complex intersections are strategically arranged throughout the network, presenting extraordinary design challenges. Leveraging the unique characteristics of this data center project—such as shallow overburden, large cross-sections, and closely spaced caverns in soft rock—our technical team was assembled to address critical technical challenges. Through meticulous data collection and analysis, designers collaborated closely with construction contractors to pioneer several groundbreaking technologies, resulting in five invention patents and seven scientific papers published in leading journals. These efforts have successfully resolved the difficult issues of ensuring safe and rapid construction under these challenging conditions.

Honored Achievements: