An artist's impression of the planned data center in the Horinger New Area. [Photo/North News Network]

The digital economy is booming in Hohhot city, capital of North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, according to local media reports.

In recent years, it has become known as the capital city's sub-center and has used its competitive advantages as an industrial hub to support the construction of a new generation of information infrastructure – while accelerating the introduction of various big data and cloud computing infrastructure projects.

The China Telecom Cloud Computing Inner Mongolia Information Park is one of the major projects in the current development of a Horinger data center cluster in the Horinger New Area of Hohhot. 

Plans are for the park to be home to 42 data centers and 19 support buildings. Each data center will be able to provide 2,700 racks and have cloud computing capabilities of nearly 36,000 servers.

The China Mobile Hohhot Data Center project, with a total investment of 15 billion yuan ($2.11 billion), will be constructed in three phases.

In the first phase – which has been completed – three data computer rooms, a spare parts storage center and two operations support centers have been constructed. The first phase has an installed capacity of 600,000 servers and 126 companies – including Baidu and Alibaba – have settled in.

In the second phase, two data room buildings have been completed and have started production.

At present, 16 data center projects are under construction or are holding negotiations in the "China Cloud Valley" in the Horinger New Area.

A dedicated international internet data channel was launched on July 6 in the new area, representing the first of its kind in the region.

It is expected to boost the efficiency and quality of connections between enterprises in the autonomous region and the world.

This is projected to provide strong support for Inner Mongolia's cross-regional and cross-border computing power scheduling, settlements and data applications, as well as for research and development.