Schneider Electric wired up to meet businesses' digital competitiveness

With Chinese companies across many industries experiencing a growing demand for building data centers to uphold their digital competitiveness, Schneider Electric SE, a French multinational energy management company, pledged to allocate more resources to meet the need for power quality management and carbon reduction in the years ahead, said a senior executive.

The transformation of the Chinese market is driven by a range of advantages — a vast market scale, massive data resources and diverse application scenarios. China's digital economic scale and total computing power rank second in the world, said Pankaj Sharma, executive vice-president of Schneider Electric.

"In the contradiction between high energy consumption and dual-carbon sustainable growth, how to help data centers meet increasingly stringent energy efficiency management metrics and reach sustainability goals has become urgent challenges for businesses," said Sharma, who is also the group's head of the secure power division and data center business, noting that Schneider Electric will continue to increase investment in innovation to seize more market share in China.

China's data center services market witnessed a year-on-year growth of 12.7 percent in 2022, reaching a market size of 129.35 billion yuan ($17.74 billion), according to a report released by global market research company International Data Corp.

IDC predicts that China's data center services market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18.9 percent from 2023 to 2027, with an estimated market size of 307.5 billion yuan in 2027.

Highlighting the country's multitude of policy initiatives and pivotal projects, including the east-data-west-computing project and continued coordination and optimization of computing power infrastructure, Sharma said these moves have ignited a tremendous surge in demand within China's data center industry.

According to the government's latest plan for the overall layout of the country's digital development introduced in February, China will open up the main arteries of digital infrastructure, systematically optimize the layout of computing power infrastructure, promote efficient complementarity and collaborative link between eastern and western computing power, guide the rational echelon layout of data centers, and improve overall infrastructure application levels.

Data center infrastructure has undergone a significant evolution to meet the increasing demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads in recent years. This evolution encompasses several key developments, including specialized hardware, high-performance computing, liquid cooling and modular data centers.

For example, some data centers are implementing liquid cooling solutions to tackle the heat generated by high-density computing. It is more efficient than traditional air cooling and allows for denser hardware configurations.

As China embarks on a new era characterized by innovation and sustainable growth, Sharma said that Schneider Electric has adopted a strategy of creating multiple research and development hubs and will continue to do so in China. This will improve product applications and make its supply chain shorter.

Sharma said that the sixth China International Import Expo fully demonstrates the country's determination to continue to expand opening-up and create a favorable business environment.

"Relying on the CIIE platform, we will continue to bring many new ideas, new products, new services and new applications, and form alliances with like-minded Chinese partners to achieve growth together," he said.

Multinational corporations remain adamant about ramping up investment in the Chinese market as a result of the country's stepped-up efforts to push continuous progress in expanding opening-up, said Chang Xiuze, a professor at the Academy of Macroeconomic Research in Beijing.

Foreign direct investment used in China's manufacturing sector amounted to 262.4 billion yuan between January and September of 2023, representing a 2.4 percent increase on a yearly basis, with high-tech manufacturing seeing a growth of 12.8 percent year-on-year, said the Ministry of Commerce.