Photo: Screenshot from a report by CCTV News

China's first high-altitude cave-style computing cabin intelligent computing center officially commenced operations at the Lianghekou hydropower plant, in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, CCTV News reported on Friday. 

With a total investment of 350 million yuan ($49.71 million), the project includes six computing cabins equipped with 2,000 domestically produced computing chips, capable of performing up to 60 exaflops (60 billion billion floating-point operations per second).

With a planned total installed capacity of 3 million kW, the Lianghekou hydropower plant is located on the Yalong River in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Southwest China's Sichuan Province.

The project is located within the construction tunnel of the hydropower plant, which is designed to withstand seismic intensity of up to 8 degrees. By leveraging the natural stability of the hydropower station's cave geological structure, the facility can effectively resist natural disasters such as earthquakes and heavy rainfall, providing a safe and reliable operating environment for computing equipment, the report said.

Photo: Screenshot from a report by CCTV News

 
Utilizing the tunnel's natural constant-temperature advantage, the project maintains a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) value—an energy efficiency indicator—below 1.2, achieving a leading domestic standard. 

Additionally, by sharing the hydropower station's high-level security configuration, the project meets the stringent data security requirements of the computing cabins, according to the report. 

With the last 500,000-kW power generation unit officially putting into use, a mega hydropower plant built at an average altitude of 3,000 meters, the highest one of its kind in China, went fully operational on March 18, 2022, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

With a planned total installed capacity of 3 million kW, the Lianghekou hydropower plant is located on the Yalong River in Garze.

Global Times